UNKNOWN REMAINS

By Peter Leonard Counterpoint, 395 pages, $25

At one point in Peter Leonard’s rambunctious new novel, a principal character flees New York City, hiding out at a place in Florida not far north of Miami. For devoted readers of Leonard’s late father, Elmore, the locale is familiar: a two-storey motel called the Sands close to the ocean in Pompano Beach. It is undoubtedly the establishment of the same name and location once owned by George Moran, the central character in Elmore Leonard’s Cat Chaser.

This small tip of the hat from son to father is the single connection in Unknown Remains between the two writers. It wasn’t always this way. In Peter Leonard’s earliest novels — he’s now up to eight — his style seemed a diluted brand of Elmore’s. But now Peter has pretty much worked out a distinctive approach of his own.

Unknown Remains begins on the morning of 9/11 in the office of a stockbroker named Jack McCann on the 89th floor of Tower One in the World Trade Center. Everybody assumes Jack dies when terrorists bring down the tower. That’s what his widow Diane thinks, which makes her more than routinely shocked when she discovers Jack had been having an affair with a beautiful young woman named Vicki and, worse, that Jack has apparently left behind a debt to mob guys totalling three-quarters of a million bucks.

Diane, a particularly strong character in a narrative filled with sinister oddballs and other eccentrics, spends the rest of the book dealing with both dilemmas and their high potential for disaster, all of it told in a manner that keeps the reader turning the pages.