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Elmore Leonard’s style is to release his characters into a plot that is as chaotic as real life. Every one of his character’s decisions creates choices that demand subsequent decisions. And his characters, being as true to form as they are, make good, bad, brilliant and terrible decisions all the way through. By the time you reach the end of a Leonard novel, the beginning seems to have hardly mattered.

Leonard’s approach leads to some amazing moments in his books mostly because those moments arrive through the believable reasoning of his characters. For this approach to work, however, the characters need to be few in number. It requires concerted path to illuminate the reasoning of a hitman or a starlet or a US Marshal, and the greater number of characters in a Leonard novel, the less illuminated those paths become.

This is the problem with Mr. Majestic. There are so many characters that the magic becomes diluted and the path becomes less convincing. The story is still very entertaining, but the “Leonard Moments� did not reach out and grab me as with his other novels that have far fewer characters.