Forty Million Reasons was written for my absolutely favorite crime fiction writer. I tried to write what I think Elmore Leonard would enjoy reading.

Darnell Crews has been running a gallery on NE 2nd Avenue in Little Haiti for twenty-one years. He knows what something is when he sees it. When Erzulie Joseph asks him to look at a painting that's been above her sofa for forty-three years, he looks at it ? and something happens that doesn't always happen when he looks at paintings. He stops.

The painting is by Jean-Elie Voltaire, who was twenty-five years old and running from the Duvalier government when he made it, and who died at twenty-eight in October 1964. Nobody in the art world knows his name. Three families in Little Haiti have been keeping his work for sixty years without knowing what they had.

Meanwhile: Celestin, twenty-four years old and fifty million monthly listeners, is three weeks from signing a forty-million-dollar record deal that his manager has been quietly structuring against him for two years. The lawyer sent to close the deal starts asking questions nobody has thought to ask. Like: what does Celestin actually want?

And from Atlanta: two debt collectors, patient and professional, are in Miami because the deal is the only way someone gets paid. One of them keeps thinking about his uncle Clifford, who played guitar in Atlanta from 1975 to 1994 and was extraordinary and got nothing.

Four threads. One neighborhood. Everything converging on a gallery event where a painter who died sixty years ago will finally have his name said aloud in the right room.