MAITLAND

An antiques dealer who moonlights as a bounty hunter runs into enough trouble to make him wonder whether he should have stuck to his day job.

When Barry McDermott, a Chicago attorney arrested for sex with a 15-year-old girl, skips out on $300,000 bail, his bondsman asks bail-enforcement officer Evan Maitland if he’d like to hunt him down for ten percent of the bond. Maitland has no trouble tracking Barry to his married (and therefore not underage) girlfriend in Oklahoma City, but he doesn’t know the half of it. At the time of his arrest, Barry just happened to be in possession of an $800,000 drug payment that rightfully belonged to the Raetown Posse. Now a boatload of Jamaican gangsters headed by the fearsome Trevor Jim Collins and his lieutenant, the more philosophical Jukie Blake, are even more interested than Maitland in finding him, and even less concerned about the ethics of the situation. First-timer Hunt mixes his pitches expertly, mixing hard sliders (the incompetent and sometimes venal cops convinced that Maitland’s working with the Jamaicans who are trying to kill him) with the occasional curveball (the improbable number of good-looking women who stand by their men until all of a sudden they don’t).

A world-weary but hopeful hero, a nice eye for the difference between professional and emotional involvement, and almost too much action for Maitland to handle. Hunt could be Elmore Leonard’s less humorous son.