For the life of her, Honey can't imagine why she ever married Walter Schoen. He's boring. He never gets her jokes. His hero is Adolf Hitler.

He may be just a butcher, but with those owlish pince-nez glasses pinched on his nose, he's a dead ringer for Hitler's chief henchman, Heinrich Himmler - and proud of it.

And then there's his habit of pointing his finger at her like a gun each time he noisily passes gas.

So Honey leaves him. But now, with World War II grinding to a close, she's got a cute FBI agent and a drop-dead handsome U.S. marshal stopping by to ask whether Walter might be hiding a couple of escaped Nazi prisoners of war.

Which gives Honey the dilemma of deciding which lawman to sleep with. Then again, one of those escaped prisoners is darned good looking, too.

Elmore Leonard excels at creating smart, sexy, confident female characters; and the main character in "Up in Honey's Room" (William Morrow, $25.95) may be the best of them since "Rum Punch," (1992), whose female lead was later immortalized by Pam Grier in the movie "Jackie Brown." The story gets rolling when U.S. Marshal Carl Webster, first introduced in "The Hot Kid" (2006), tracks the escapees to Detroit and enlists Honey to help him find them, which gives her an excuse to pop in on her ex and shout, "Sig Heil, y'all."

As usual, Leonard tells his story in his flawlessly colloquial prose style, with pitch-perfect dialogue.

"The Hot Kid" was a violent tale devoid of the usual Leonard humor. In "Up in Honey's Room," the humor is back, emerging as usual from Leonard's acute portrayals of human nature.

Besides Honey and Walter, Leonard gives himself a lot of material to work with. There's Countess Vera Mezwa Radzykewycz, a Mata Hari-like spy master, and Bohdan Kravchenko, her psychopathic, cross-dressing lover. There's Joseph J. Aubrey, the rib-joint king and KKK Grand Dragon. There's Jurgen Schrenk, an SS tank commander who wants to become an American cowboy, and his fellow Nazi escapee who falls for a Jewish girl in Detroit and runs away with her to Cleveland.

The latter character is named Otto Penzler, Leonard having a little fun with a friend of the same name, whose imprint at Harcourt Inc., Otto Penzler Books, specializes in crime novels.