Elmore Leonard strikes me as being the finest thriller writer alive primarily because he does his best to efface style, and has done this so successfully that few readers know about him at all. Since 1953, Leonard has written a remarkable series of novels, Westerns as well as thrillers, the latest of which is Split Images…. There are no wisecrack-eloquent detectives or over-wrought similes in Leonard's writing. His characters are often lower-middle-class people who fall into crime because it's an easier way to make money than that tedious nine-to-five. Leonard's favorite plot is the revenge story—someone exploited by criminals commits a bigger better crime that ruins his or her victimizers….

[In] Split Images, Walter Kouza, a 21-year veteran of the Detroit police force, leaves his job to become a chauffeur for Robbie Daniels, a demented millionaire whose hobby is planning the assassination of a larcenous Latin American fat cat. Kouza knows he's asking for trouble, but figures that being well-paid and enjoying a few upper-class comforts is worth enduring a little of his employer's madness. What he doesn't realize is that Daniels is more than a right-wing eccentric—he's a peevish killer who uses his gun collection to plug anyone who annoys him. Pretty soon, another cop—honest plodder Bryan Hurd, the hero of the tale—is on the trail of both of them.

Split Images is filled with references to recent public shootings: upon first seeing his old colleague Hurd, Walter Kouza jabbers, "You believe it? Secret Service're standing there, the guy squeezes off six rounds, empties the piece, then, then they're all over him … what's his name, Hinckle? Then this other thing, Jesus Christ, the motive, thing with the broad? What's her name, Jodie Foster? 'Gain her respect and love'—I never even heard of her…." As Split Images unwinds, Leonard fills the air with violence; fact and fiction merge. After Daniels murders a parking-lot attendant, a policeman inspecting the body notes that "the one in the head very much like that press secretary, what's his name?"

More is at stake here than trendy timeliness. Leonard's references capture the way monstrous crimes enter our minds as a jumble of TV-news details, bad jokes, and nightmares—the way everyone is always burying the information, always saying, "What's his name?" Leonard never pushes for a profound analysis; he knows that violence works in superficial ways….

Split Images is in many ways a companion piece to his 1980 City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit…. Both novels feature cops as their heroes instead of thieves, and both attempt to stoke a romance between the policeman and a woman whose career is just as rough.

But romance curdles Leonad's writing. During the sticky scenes in Split Images, he reverts to being an ad man for the amorous: "He said I love you. He said it again and then again, trying the emphasis on a different word. He said, I'm in love with you …" … His inability to convey a complex love relationship may define his limitation as a novelist, even as it indicates the extent of his ambition.

But the failed romance doesn't ruin Split Images; the book has a hard, clean narrative voice that sets the scene properly before the characters begin their icy chatter. And though he's named George Higgins as a crucial exemplar, it's clear that Leonard also understands Higgins's flaw: in reducing the thriller to pure dialogue, he rendered his novels as elegantly mannered as Ivy Compton-Burnett's.

Leonard resists mannerism instinctively; it's one reason he ditches his heroes from book to book, always inventing new crooks and detectives who weight the balance between good and bad in quirky disproportion. Early on in Leonard's best novels, there's always a disorienting, exhilarating period when you can't tell where your sympathy is supposed to fall; the first few chapters not only offer up the donnée of the thriller plot, but also spend a while picking, choosing, and discarding people—a cop who looks like a pip of a fellow in chapter one gets blown away in chapter three so that a seedy hood flitting around the back alleys of the story can step into the glare of Leonard's admiring prose. The best thing about Split Images, in fact, is that initially it looks as if we'll have to work up a fondness for rich, twitchy Robbie Daniels; what a relief it is when Bryan Hurd, as unassuming a gumshoe as you'll find this side of Jim Rockford, comes forward to mull over Daniels's nastiness.

This lovely trick of Leonard's—the ability to keep you in the dark about not only where the story is going, but also who its hero is—adds great force to the violence that rears up regularly; it permits the author to dispatch characters you may have been convinced were central to the drama. In all of this there's a kind of wicked amorality. Thriller writers can be the cruelest of artist-gods, lopping off heads in cynical, mean ways, as if envisioning the colorful scenes they'll make in the movie version. But Leonard is much more skillful, more scarily witty, than that. The violence in his books is quick, quiet, and brutal; it's the kind that can strike you as being true and realistic even though the actions are utterly beyond your experience. Can an artist receive a higher compliment than that?