Dara and Xavier arrive in East Africa to make a documentary about Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. They meet a pirate, a guy who's supposed to be talking pirates out of being pirates, a wealthy Texan with a huge shotgun and a new girlfriend and an American Al Qaeda guy who wants to blow something up. Dara and Xavier talk about films and the film they're making and about stuff that happened. Leonard does that a lot, have the characters tell the story for big chunks. They tell each other what happens, they describe people, they describe the setting and the set-up and the whole damn thing.

Like Cuba Libre, it's an atypical setting for Leonard, but Leonard makes it his own, and the story and the action flow nice and smooth and the cool dialogue and the cool characters, gauging each other's levels off cool, comparing everything to movies, thinking what they're going to say, how it'll sound, what it'll look like. Some carry it off, and some do not. in a Leonard book, it's a matter of life and death.