Up In Honey's Room

Arliss Howard demonstrated his mastery of rural American voices in Elmore Leonard's THE HOT KID, in which he first breathed life into the character of Deputy U.S. Marshal Carl Webster. Now, in UP IN HONEY'S ROOM--a sequel of sorts--Howard expands on that performance as he voices Nazi POWs, a Ukrainian femme fatale, a cross-dressing hit man, and one of the most carnal Elmore Leonard characters, the lovely Honey Deal. Though the plot sounds like pulp fiction--a lawman tracks POWs and spy rings in 1945 Detroit--the novel is much more. It's a strange, often absurd history lesson that ultimately hinges on whether Carl will honor his marriage vows to his machine-gun-toting spouse . . . or succumb to Honey's charms. R.W.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

April 2, 2007
Set in the waning days of WWII, bestseller Leonard's disappointing 40th novel finds gunslinging U.S. marshal Carl Webster, introduced in 2005's The Hot Kid
, on the trail of Jurgen Schrenk and Otto Penzler, German POWs escaped from their Okmulgee, Okla., detention camp. The pair wind up in Detroit in the care of Walter Schoen, a butcher and Himmler look-alike, with whose ex-wife, wisecracking bottle-blonde Honey Deal, Carl soon finds himself smitten. While married Carl contemplates breaking his marriage vows (Honey does anything but dissuade him), Otto disappears and a dysfunctional German spy ring—led by hard-drinking Vera Mezwa and her cross-dressing manservant, Bohdan—cozies up with Jurgen. Vera and Bohdan, meanwhile, are secretly planning to disappear, but Bohdan wants to put in the ground anyone who could later give them up to the Feds. Leonard's writing—line by line—is as sharp as ever, but the plotting is uncharacteristically clunky and the pacing is stuck in low gear. Leonard has written a lot of great books, but this isn't one of them.