Dick Francis is now indubitably one of...

Dick Francis is now indubitably one of the superstars among mystery/thriller writers: 200,000 first printings, major ad budgets, the works. The Edge, by my reckoning his 27th thriller, has a more contrived and confining plot than his others, but it is suspenseful as always and interesting because there is less of the ultra-graphic violence that has been one of Francis’ hallmarks.

A bored and wealthy young horse lover has enlivened his life by getting into undercover work around racecourses. Now he is posing as a waiter aboard “The Great Intercontinental Mystery Race Train,” bound west from Ottawa with a cargo of prize horses and their owners, aiming toward a kind of Super Derby in Vancouver.

Vile deeds are feared en route. The faked theatrical mystery enacted now and again along the way thus blends conveniently with the “real” perils. The villain is no mystery: a thoroughly nasty self-made man who has been acquiring fine horses by infamous but so far unprosecutable means. The suspense is what he’ll get away with, and how, and whether he can be thwarted.

There is at last a thrilling race--Francis at his descriptive best, catching all the passion of the sport. Before that the plot roars through the Canadian days and nights with action aplenty but the violence muted, as if Francis himself wanted to take life a bit more calmly. Still “The Edge” ranks well up among his titles.

Jonathan Gash is the pen name of Dr. John Grant, a London pathologist who collects art and antiques and who writes funny mysteries involving a rascally “divvy” named Lovejoy. “Divvy” is for diviner--one who can divine the real antiques from the fake. He also stars in a BBC series now seen here.

In Jade Woman, Lovejoy’s 12th outing, he has been hounded out of England to Hong Kong (where the author lived in the ‘60s, and which he knows intimately and loves exceedingly). Robbed, penniless and achingly hungry, Lovejoy begins as badly off as even anti-heroes ever get. But word of his skills and his operative cynicism has preceded him and he is quickly involved with musclemen, dwarfs, gorgeous women and competing evil-doers of great complexity.

The antiques lore is a bonus; the action is continuously surprising, Lovejoy is a fine guide to the territory and Gash--first printing 50,000--is making his own swift and well-deserved ascent of that grand index of success.

As in much recent fiction, the ‘60s are the backdrop to present events in Kate Green’s Night Angel. Six old friends from the flower-power days at Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury reunite in San Francisco because a seventh friend, Lora, has apparently died in a boating accident. There are incidental musics of witchcraft and the occult, as well as the drugs of then and now. The unearthed past includes several deaths, and the present grows more deadly each day. Maggie Shea, in from Minneapolis, is the innocent central figure, imperiled at last by one of the group’s horrific obsessions.

Green’s cast of characters and the volume of exposition past and present give her book some dangerously unwieldy moments, and the denouement is disappointingly Grand Guignol after the sense of a real time remembered in the earlier passages. Yet the book has considerable power, precisely from its accurate re-creation of the days of hope and psychedelia.

Marcia Muller has created a winning character in Sharon McCone, investigator for a small, cooperative San Francisco law firm. In There’s Something in a Sunday, she is staked out observing a ranch manager from Hollister making peculiar weekend rounds in San Francisco. Why her client and her quarry should both turn up dead is a question buried in a very tangled past. As before, Muller’s strength is in her characters--McCone is likable and believable--and her ability to convey places and atmospheres.

Anthony Mancini, himself said to be an identical twin, in Menage writes about twin brothers, separated at birth in the classic tradition. One is now a wimpy, not-too-successful New York actor, the other a homeless wino, discovered polishing windshields at traffic lights in Greenwich Village. The actor’s amoral and oversexed wife immediately sees the prospects for a fat insurance scam--insuring the actor, bumping off the wino, reunion in Europe and happy ever after.

Wino he may be, but brother is no dummy. The first-person narrative alternates between the brothers, creating a teasing suspense about which twin survives. The sex along the way is continuous and kinky, the title apt. For those who like the sex in their mysteries to be more hint than tell, “Menage” is probably not the answer, though its plotting is deucedly clever.

Josephine Tey, who was in reality a Scots woman named Elizabeth MacKintosh and who wrote also as Gordon Daviot, died in London in 1952. In 23 years, starting in 1929, she published a relative handful of plays and mysteries. But the mysteries, like The Franchise Affair, are now rightly regarded as timeless models of the form, with a rich and leisurely presentation of period, place and, most especially, character.

In “The Franchise Affair,” there is no murder at all, only a cruel deception involving a ruthless young woman and an elderly mother and daughter, with a dull country lawyer trying to set things right. The press and the bigots are a-howl and the suspense is how the young woman engineered it all, what was going on and whether she’ll get her comeuppance. Wonderful reading, in a welcome new edition.

THE EDGE by Dick Francis (G.P. Putnam’s Sons: $18.95; 324 pp.) JADE WOMAN by Jonathan Gash (St. Martin’s: $17.95; 273 pp.) NIGHT ANGEL by Kate Green (Delacorte: $15.95; 280 pp.) THERE’S SOMETHING IN A SUNDAY by Marcia Muller (Mysterious Press: $15.95; 224 pp.) MENAGE by Anthony Mancini (Donald I. Fine: $17.95; 224 pp.) THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR AND OTHER NOVELS by Josephine Tey (Collier: $3.95 each, paper)