No one these days draws a nastier...

No one these days draws a nastier picture of seamy Los Angeles at its seamiest than Robert Campbell, who first put La-La Land in book titles and earlier wrote the award-winning “The Junkyard Dog.”

In Juice, Campbell continues his portrayal of our village’s lower-depths life style where kindness and other virtues are scarcer, on either side of the law, than clear air. His central figure this time is a monstrous loan shark named Alfonso (Puffy) Pachoulo, and the story’s suspense is whether Pachoulo will ever get his comeuppance and if so when and at whose hands. Probably not Panama Heath’s. He is an untidy vice cop who is the least incompetent of the lawmen in view.

The dialogue has a ferocious tang, and Campbell negotiates a tricky line between the low-comic buffoonery and the ugliness of his characters. But he is raucously entertaining about a world that seems a galaxy away from the guilty vicarages of yesteryear.

One of the great chroniclers of the early West, A. B. Guthrie Jr. (“The Big Sky,” “The Way West”) has latterly tried his hand at crime fiction, in a style more British than American in its quiet, contained warmth.

His sleuth is a Montana sheriff named Chick Charlesworth. In Murder in the Cotswolds, the fifth in a series, Charleston and his wife are staying at a country inn as they tour villages with fine names like Lower Slaughter and Stow-in-the-Wold. A fellow guest at the inn, an unpleasant fellow in a party comprised mostly of other Americans, develops a fatal knife in the back.

Charlesworth, lending a hand to the not overly grateful British police, unearths a back story of fraud and betrayal that explains all. It’s all sedately likable, and at a very remote extreme indeed from Campbell’s juicy Gomorrah.

On the Edge, from the versatile and reliable English writer Peter Lovesey, has some kinship with Patricia Highsmith’s “Strangers on a Train,” as involving two characters with a mutual interest in murder. The setting is early postwar London and two women, pals from their wartime military service, meet again by accident and discover that both are stuck in unsatisfactory marriages, from which there seems no civilized escape. A swapping of rub-outs looks to be an ideal answer.

It’s a delicious study of characters under duress, as Lovesey watches murderers fall out, like thieves, and acquire a well-justified paranoia. Lovesey’s tale builds to a grisly last outing in a homemade bomb shelter, and there is a last-page twist that Saki, and Alfred Hitchcock, would have admired.

Another prolific mysterian, San Francisco’s Joe Gores, has in Wolf Time” done a first-class thriller, which mixes present politics (a presidential candidacy) and dark secrets from the past. Its central figure, a loner and a hunter, survives an assassination attempt that is made to look like a deer-hunting accident. (Gores on the theme of a man alone in the wilderness recalls Geoffrey Household, which is an admirable recollection.)

Why is the man a target, what secret he holds and how he can fight back makes for a fine, suspenseful and surprising story, with a wonderful, echoing finish.

Professional wrestling is the backdrop for Michael J. Katz’s Last Dance in Redondo Beach, and to his credit, Katz makes the men behind the gaudy facades believable figures rather than comic grotesques.

A masked wrestler, who evidently managed to hide his true identity in and out of the ring and was widely disliked in the trade for failing to lose on cue, drowns during the taping of a television special.

Andy Sussman, a television sportscaster, is Katz’s hero, commanded by the network to pursue the story for film at 11 or any other time. The drowning was a murder, naturally, and the unmasking of both victim and killer is cleverly and rather comically plotted. Matters are not very serious.

Katz does nicely with his evocation of behind-the-scenes television and behind-the-scenes wrestling, curiously alike in their strenuous quest for foolish thrills that have a patina of reality. The setting, perhaps inevitably, is the Southern California coast.

A former priest, William X. Kienzle, continues the adventures of his accidental sleuth, Father Robert Koesler of Detroit. Eminence, the 11th in the series which began with “The Rosary Murders,” is also one of the strongest.

A peculiar order of monks--chartered by an obscure bishop in Italy, although the monks are American--sets up a healing ministry in Detroit. One of the monks performs two apparent miracles, restoring a woman’s sight and banishing another woman’s multiple ails.

The archbishop assigns Koesler to investigate, and there is plenty to investigate, including a lethal imposter, a well-hidden murder and an ingenious scheme to fleece a bank of a cool million.

As always, Koesler’s command of ecclesiastical detail is full and fascinating. He deals here with the whole question of apparent miracles, the resulting public frenzy and the awkward questions for the church on how to respond. Additionally, in “Eminence,” the uses of Latin and points of Canon law are significant clues.

JUICE by Robert Campbell (Poseidon: $18.95; 254 pp.)

MURDER IN THE COTSWOLDS by A.B. Guthrie Jr. (Houghton, Mifflin: $16.95; 194 pp.)

ON THE EDGE by Peter Lovesey (Mysterious Press: $16.95; 204 pp.)

WOLF TIME by Joe Gores (G.P. Putnam’s Sons: $17.95; 324 pp.)

LAST DANCE IN REDONDO BEACH by Michael J. Katz (G.P. Putnam’s Sons: $17.95; 256 pp.)

EMINENCE by William X. Kienzle (Andrews & McMeel: $15.95; 312 pp.)

THE IMMEDIATE PROSPECT OF BEING HANGED by Walter Walker (Viking: $17.95; 297 pp.)