Fashion model Kelly Barr is in a tough spot. Under duress, she agreed to help her roommate and fellow model Chloe Robinette “entertain” Chloe’s 84-year-old boyfriend, a wealthy lawyer named Tony Paradiso. It’s pure luck that she’s out of the room when two men break in and shoot both Mr. Paradise and Chloe dead. But that luck doesn’t last long, as Paradiso’s ex-con fixer wants her help getting hold of some valuable items the old man left behind in a safety deposit box in Chloe’s name. Now he wants her to pretend to be her apparently nearly-identical friend and go down to the bank with him. Kelly doesn’t really have any ethical qualms about the fraud itself, but once she gets a look at Frank Delsa, the recently widowed homicide detective assigned to find the killers, she thinks she’s got a better way out of this mess.
The strength of Elmore Leonard’s novels is his keen understanding of human nature. Criminals, like most people, are pretty dumb and prone to make mistakes. Especially the ones who think they’re really smart. Elmore Leonard bad guys constantly try to plot and scheme their way out of trouble, only to dig themselves deeper and deeper into trouble.
Of course, Leonard’s “good guys” are human too. Delsa is a cool customer most of the time, and an easy one for the reader to root for, but he’s only a man after all and maybe a little too willing to look past the fact that the fashion model brazenly hitting on him is a witness to a double-homicide.
Elmore Leonard novels are mostly about the vibes and in Mr. Paradise the vibes are mostly good. There’s some awkwardness to be found in an old white man trying to write dialogue for young black male characters, but the reader can sense the effort Leonard put into it. The plot is definitely a secondary consideration, but Leonard can’t help but be entertaining.