Quiver

March 10, 2008
A fatal hunting accident propels this disappointing debut set in Detroit and environs from Leonard, the son of legendary crime writer Elmore Leonard. Given that 16-year-old Luke McCall shoots an arrow that passes through a deer and kills his former race-car champion father, Owen, one might expect more focus on Luke’s psychological torment than on the efforts of Owen’s devastated widow, Kate, to contend with a string of unscrupulous suitors, starting with her old lover, Jack Curran, who once rescued Kate from a Peace Corps assignment in Guatemala turned ugly. Curran conceals not only his recent prison stint but also his continued association with a group of desperate and sadistic criminals, including Teddy Hicks, who assaulted Owen several years earlier. A kidnapping engineered by Hicks and company leads to a violent showdown at the McCalls’ hunting lodge. A muddled plot, one-dimensional characters and a predictable ending will leave readers hoping for better things in Leonard’s next novel.

June 30, 2008
Leonard begins his short debut novel with several disparate sequences that, being exposition, don't give reader Scott Sowers much to work with. A new widow recalls telling her husband of her violent escape from eastern Guatemala. A convict gets an early release from an Arizona prison. The widow's memory shifts to her son accidentally killing his father with a bow and arrow. Three sociopaths engage in various criminal activities. Not only are these story shards confusing, the characters are not very engaging, the one exception being a jive-talking, ultra-cool villain named Dejuan, whom Sowers smartly mines for all his much-needed sinister dark humor. Eventually the elements coalesce into a tense kidnap thriller that Sowers delivers with effective energy and pacing. The package includes a conversation between the author and his father, Elmore Leonard, who discusses his famous “10 Rules of Good Writing.” Peter should have paid more attention to the one about leaving out the parts that readers tend to skip. A St. Martin's Minotaur hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 10).