I read an article about [Elmore Leonard] in Writer's Digest a few months ago and went out and bought his City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit…. It's practically a textbook in hardboiled cop style, without the self-consciousness that usually goes with such a style. I loved it enough to buy Cat Chaser, which I thought was even better. So when Split Images arrived in one of those cancerous tan envelopes, I was looking forward to reading it that night.

I wasn't disappointed. Mr. Leonard doesn't strain himself with character details, but somehow the characters are three-dimensional and compelling. The plot isn't complex—cop hunts down playboy killer while courting dynamic woman reporter—but its simplicity is one of its strengths. Leonard's main fault here is that he does not do a believable job in establishing the love interest, a problem in all three of the books of his...