Being related to the boss is often a good thing, and nepotism of all kinds has a long and even occasionally honorable tradition, from royal families to American unions. Your father is king, maybe you get to be king. Your father is head of Local 123, you get a job loading trucks or, on Broadway, you get to be one of the three guys paid to move a lamp.

When it’s a question of royalty, the general population doesn’t get to have a say in the matter very often; nor does an unrelated truck loader or lamp mover.

Everything changes in the arts. Kirk Douglas’s son might have moved to the front of a few lines, but if moviegoers didn’t like Michael Douglas, and if he wasn’t any good at his job, he’d be the third lead in summer stock in Vancouver. Norah Jones may have had a few doors opened by her father, Ravi Shankar, but if she couldn’t sing, play piano, or write some pretty good songs, she’d be working in the lounge of a Holiday Inn in Des Moines. Because her mother has been a worldwide mega-seller for three decades, that first novel by Carol Higgins Clark might have been read by a senior editor rather than a junior assistant, but if readers didn’t like her books, she’d be submitting occasional stories to online magazines instead of being an 11-time best-selling author.

To look at it from a slightly different perspective: How is that for feeling a little pressure? How is it for Peter Leonard, who happens to be the son of one of the greatest crime writers who ever lived, Elmore Leonard, now that he’s decided to try his hand at writing his own thriller?

You think having that DNA is a big helping hand? Even knowing that every critic and reader in the country is bound to compare your first book with the glowing memories they have of your dad’s best books?

Well, I’m here to tell you that it must be possible for talent to pass from one generation to the next, because “Quiver” (St. Martin’s Minotaur, 276 pages, $23.95) is a spectacular debut.

I like opening scenes like the one in “Quiver.” The female star, Kate, meets Owen, her future husband, a successful race-car driver, when they crash shopping carts in the supermarket; he asks her out, and they exchange stories with crisp dialogue that makes you want to spend the rest of the book with them. But that’s not what happens.

The story line takes us forward to when Owen takes their teenage son, Luke, bow-hunting. Owen is killed in a freak accident when Luke’s arrow goes straight through a deer and into his father’s chest, sending the boy into deep, sullen depression.

Meanwhile, Kate’s former boyfriend, Jack, has gotten out of prison after serving 38 months of a five-year term for armed robbery because he convinced his parole board that he had found God. Needing a place to stay, he visits his sister, who, when she opens the door, asks if he escaped. No, he tells her, “I found Jesus.” Without hesitation, she says, “Yeah, right.”

Spending some quality time together, she tells him of her career as a “nail technologist” and the creativity it allows her to express, painting flowers and butterflies on fingernails with bright colors and rhinestones. Her dream is to open her own place and call it Ultimate Nails. “I think that says it all,” she says.

Jack thinks, “That’s what happens, you try to be nice to someone, they bore the hell out of you.” He decides it is impossible for him to go straight.

The money from Jack’s old robbery was never recovered, and his partners want their share. When they catch up with Jack, he explains that he hid it in a motel that was subsequently razed to become a strip mall. They don’t believe him.

Jack plans to con Kate, who was left wealthy when her husband died, out of some money, but his partners have bigger plans, which is when things get really dicey for her and her son.

With a large cast of characters — each presented as meticulously as an Andrew Wyeth portrait — and numerous points of view, all funneling inevitably to a stunning conclusion, you will be holding your breath until the final page.

Peter’s dad should be proud.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual Best American Mystery Stories. He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.