A twenty-year veteran running sports books for the Mob in Miami Beach, Harry Arno is all set to retire to the Italian Riviera with his girlfriend, Joyce, on the money he's skimmed off the top of profits. That is until Harry Arno is the unwitting fall guy in an FBI scam to net local organised crime and he's caught in the crossfire. On the run, he's pursued by both the violent wiseguys and Raylan Givens, a U.S. marshal with more than a few personal demons to lay where Harry is concerned.

Showing all the signs of being honed to perfection, Leonard's street-smart, dialogue-driven style glides effortlessly past the reader here like a deceptively simple, well-oiled machine. Characterisation is turned on the head of a pin, especially when it comes to the Mob - the stronzo Nicky, pumped-up would-be killer who always manages to have more excuses than notches on his gun; the Zip ("Sicilian hard-on") cold-blooded assassin import with a sense of style and sartorial elegance inherited from the old country; or the slobbish flesh mountain that is headman Jimmy Cap. Unusually for later period Leonard, the women largely play second fiddle, albeit still meaty roles, sympathetically drawn and certainly no slouches in themselves, particularly not Gloria, Cap's long-suffering and defiantly non-bimbo 22 year-old girlfriend.

With the central section of the book set in Italy, Leonard cannot resist playing Americans abroad - Givens gets to toy with the stereotyped stetson-sporting Hicksville lawman to some effect, while Arno buys a villa ("You have to get in the right frame of mind for it. Dig architecture, history, art, different related kinds of shit like that") and pontificates at ill-informed length on the life and work of local celebrity Ezra Pound.

To say Pronto is highly polished and slickly efficient is not to do it down, Leonard is too good an author for that. It gleams with express train-pacing, tools up for a satisfyingly violent climax, and bristles with more cherishable lines than you could shake a stick at - "Harry Arno believed he was a hip guy; he kept up, didn't feel anywhere near sixty-six, knew Vanilla Ice was a white guy." As Leonard would have you believe, he's simply a jobbing writer, and this novel is all guts and no pose.

On a breathless sliding-scale of his own making, Pronto is better than Rum Punch and almost as useful as Maximum Bob or Get Shorty. Criminally good.