The tone of Elmore Leonard's latest mystery ["LaBrava"] is dry and mordant, the action well paced and the voices of the riffraff convincing. I do not know if Mr. Leonard has captured the real Miami Beach in the pastel seediness of the place he describes, but his depiction is entirely convincing and should entice readers to be manipulated and led through an intricate maze.

Joseph LaBrava is the conventional omnicompetent, angst-ridden former agent. After too many months protecting Bess Truman from her piano parlor, he has left the Secret Service to take photographs of aged Jewish ladies sitting on the porches and Latin hustlers sauntering through the shadows of the Floridian Grand Concourse. (Is anyone writing about a American detective who is happily married?)

LaBrava finds himself photographing the principals of two seemingly separate extortion schemes. (p. 12)

LaBrava has been trained to observe—to sit endlessly inside the automotive equivalent of the plain brown wrapper watching for something to happen, to stand endlessly on boring campaign platforms and look for unusual activity in the audience, to wait endlessly for the daily arrival of the postman at Mrs. Truman's house. Having stumbled on the connection between the two schemes, the conventional detective would arrest the villain, but Mr. Leonard, playing games with his clichés, finds a much more arresting function for his hero. Mr. Leonard exploits and dismembers most of the clichés of the mystery genre by ingeniously combining them with the clichés of the old black-and-white movies LaBrava watched as a boy and again as a man while protecting Mrs. Truman.

The book's many surprises have nothing to do with the identities of the three different killers of the three victims scattered about the field. There is no question about who kills whom or why, nor are there questions about all the sleazy scams that are woven into the plot. Instead, the surprises concern the revelation, unraveling and reraveling of the book's devious design.

Elmore Leonard is a prolific author with a cult following…. "LaBrava" may be the best of Mr. Leonard's books; it is about as good as the form allows. And even in winter, it is warming to realize that next summer there will be a stock of Leonard books to substitute for the Ross Macdonald titles that won't be forthcoming. "LaBrava" has no more redeeming social value than any of the dozen petty criminals who people its pages, but it fills an evening well. (pp. 12, 26)