A Novel  Elmore Leonard   William Morrow: 280 pp., $26.99
Elmore Leonard's latest novel, his 44th, takes him beyond
America's shores, way outside the criminal turfs — Detroit,
Miami, Hollywood — he more or less owns, deep into unfamiliar
territory that looks both tempting and grabbed-from-the-
headlines. "Djibouti," as the title suggests, is set in the Horn
of Africa and tells how Dara Barr, an accomplished
documentarian, sets out with her right-hand man, Xavier LeBo, to
make a film about Somali pirates hijacking ships in the Gulf of
Aden.  Dara is determined, smart, a typically snappy and sexy
Leonard heroine who has snagged an Oscar but still looks hot in
shorts and a bra. Xavier is 6 feet 6, age 72, African American,
über-cool. They got together on Dara's film about Hurricane
Katrina, and now they're a team. As casting, the reader tends to
think, not J-Lo and Clooney (who famously starred in Steven
Soderbergh's version of "Out of Sight," the classic Leonard book
from the early 1990s) but Angelina Jolie and