Summer reads

"Up in Honey's Room"
By Elmore Leonard
Morrow, $25.95

The plot of Elmore Leonard's "Up in Honey's Room" is at least slightly whacked out: It's the tail end of World War II, and U.S. marshal Carl Webster -- introduced in Leonard's 2005 novel "The Hot Kid" -- shows up in Detroit, on the hunt for Jurgen Schrenk, a Nazi POW who has managed to wriggle out of a camp in Oklahoma. Carl suspects that Walter Schoen, a Detroit meatcutter and heel-clicking wannabe Nazi, knows where Jurgen is hiding. To get to Walter, Carl enlists the help of Walter's ex-wife, Honey Deal, an American bottle-blond firebrand with a spectacular grasp of current events and an even more spectacular rack. Honey gets the hots for the happily married Carl. But will she ever be able to get him in the sack?

Did I mention the Ukrainian temptress who regularly hosts martini-fueled spy-ring meetings in her home? Or the cross-dressing murderer with the Buster Brown haircut? The plot of "Up in Honey's Room" may threaten to veer and sputter out of control, although Leonard, as always, lands it like an ace. But the real pleasure here is his screwball-comedy prose, the way his characters joust and parry either ruthlessly or casually, depending on the occasion. When the Ukrainian hottie explains why she decided to work for the Nazi cause, she makes it clear her hatred of Russians was only part of her motivation. The rest, of course, had to do with sex: "I'll tell you something. In 1940, '41, all the young grenadiers in newsreels looked sexy to me. You were attractive, proud of yourselves, you had ideals you believed in. You sang, you marched, you sang while you marched. I remember thinking this was very bad light opera. But the upbeat mood of it was catching. I liked the purity of it, a new Germany full of healthy young men and women with Nordic features and platinum hair. In that crowd I knew I'd stand out like a film star."

That's typical of Leonard's prose, and part of the reason his novels effortlessly sell in the kajillions. The guy never wastes a word: Every sentence is like a well-packed suitcase, and that kind of economy is worth a million bucks.

-- Stephanie Zacharek

Next page: Black ops, not to mention a blurb by George Tenet