Djibouti

February 7, 2011
In Leonard's new novel, Oscar-winning documentarian Dara Barr and her 73-year-old assistant, Xavier LeBo, travel to the Horn of Africa to film Somali pirates. They get exciting footage, but Leonard, almost perversely, provides much of the action as exposition, with the filmmakers safe and sound in hotels or on yachts, discussing their adventures over champagne. This is not good news for thriller lovers, since thrills are in short supply. But it's tremendous fun for those who can't get enough of the author's snappy patter. For Tim Cain, it's a chance to demonstrate his ability to deal with pages of witty dialogue, and he shines, demonstrating quick vocal shifts, wide-ranging accents, and well-thought-out pacing. The result is a smoothly efficient, entertaining drawing room comedy in which not even terrorism is taken too seriously. A Morrow hardcover.

August 23, 2010
Leonard (Road Dogs) goes exotic with this eventually killer story of contemporary piracy set on the horn of Africa. Dara Barr, a documentary filmmaker newly arrived in Djibouti to make a film about pirates as a follow-up to her Oscar-winning Katrina documentary, and Dara's savvy friend and fixer, Xavier, stumble into a thicket of intrigue before the two are on the open water. Rogues they encounter include a "whirlwind Texas entrepreneur" sailing around the world; a crooked diplomat in league with a charismatic pirate, both eyeing a payday; and a pair of kidnapped al-Qaeda operatives, one an American citizen with a bounty on his head. Everyone has an angle or two, and once the plots stumble through an awkward first third, Leonard's hallmark breakneck pacing, crackling dialogue, and scalpel-sharp prose kick in. Seasoned Leonard readers will see some grays poking through—this at times reads like a quite good imitation of an Elmore Leonard novel—but it still beats the pants off of most of the competition.

September 1, 2010

Leonard's company of stock character types—the veteran law enforcer, the savvy professional woman, the seen-it-all sidekick, the horny billionaire—are so cool that they can confront international terrorism without batting an eyelash.

Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Dara Barr wants to make a new film about Somali pirates. Along with her grizzled factotum Xavier LeBo, she rents a boat and cruises the Horn of Africa looking for seafarers on every side of the law. While she's chatting them up and filming them, the Gold Dust Twins—Ari Ahmed Sheikh Bakar, aka Harry, and American-educated pirate Idris Mohammed—are scouring the area for terrorists, and billionaire Billy Wynn is in the neighborhood test-driving his latest girlfriend to see if Helene is up to the rigors of a topless sea voyage. The cast spends quite a while checking each other out—an extended period that will delight fans of Leonard (Road Dogs, 2009, etc.) and drive everyone else crazy—because they don't know that the catalyst of all the action has yet to make an appearance. He's Jama Raisuli, an American Muslim who together with noted al-Qaeda operative Qasim al Salah is removed from the tanker Aphrodite just after they succeeded in hiding enough phone-activated explosives aboard to blow the ship and its load of natural gas to kingdom come. When Jama escapes from his laughably incompetent Somali jailers, the countdown to Armageddon begins. Jama is determined to wreak enough havoc to make the strategic port of Djibouti a distant memory; Billy, convinced that the Aphrodite is doomed, is bent on destroying it himself well out of the port's range; Dara, realizing that Jama is executing everyone who knows that he was born James Russell, keeps filming while she awaits his inevitable approach; and Helene continues to suck up the salt air so that Billy won't have any excuse to put her ashore and move on to the next lovely spousal candidate.

Not your father's anti-terrorism yarn. Leonard's characters make James Bond look fidgety.

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Starred review from August 1, 2010
Crime fiction grand master Leonard, who turns 85 in October, remains in top form. He has a new publisher and a new subjectSomalian piratesbut all the signature Leonard elements are shining as brightly as ever: the back-and-forth banter, always oozing wit but never too smart for the room; the cast of wonderfully idiosyncratic characters, each capable of a star turn; the always startling juxtaposition of the mundane against the violent. This time, mixed in with all of that, Leonard gives us one of his trickiest plots and cleverest turns of storytelling. Dara Barr is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, recently arrived in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa (the gateway to Islam . . . or the back door to the West) to film Somalian pirates in action. With her assistant, a 72-year-old sailor named Xavier, Dara, armed with a concealed spy camera, sets off onboard the Buster in search of pirates. She finds plenty, but she and Xavier also land in the middle of an al-Qaeda plot to blow up a tanker loaded with liquefied natural gas. Portions of the tale are related in real time, but much of the narration comes in the form of Dara and Xavier viewing film of whats already happened and debating how to structure the documentary. This curious dramatic technique works magnificently, taking us inside the characters in a way that straight, action-oriented narration might not do. Leonard never tells a story in the expected way, but this time he outdoes himself. Marvelous entertainment.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)