David Martin’s four previous non-mystery novels disclosed...

David Martin’s four previous non-mystery novels disclosed a far-ranging imagination, an intense and poetic prose style and a deep curiosity about the dark reaches of the human soul. His best-known, “The Crying Heart Tattoo,” about the beginning relationship between a young boy and an older woman and how it evolved over the decades, was an eccentric but affecting love story.

In Lie to Me (Random House: $18.95; 261 pp.), Martin turns to crime: a worn-out cop’s pursuit of a demented killer who is one of the true and horrifying grotesques of recent fiction. The detective, Teddy Camel, has a reputation as a human lie detector. He says he believes the widow when she says that the torture murder of her rich husband was suicide, with a side order of self-mutilation.

Shifting the novel’s points of view between Camel and the woozy perceptions of the killer, Martin tells a tale that is Gothic in its grisliness but disturbingly persuasive in its setting out of why the killer is as he is, and why the ghastly confrontation in the upscale Virginia suburbs of Washington had an inevitability about it.

As before, Martin is a master writer whose present-tense evocations of the killer’s states of mind are frightening, yet at the same time make him as pathetic as his victims. The book could well bring Martin the wider audience he well deserves.

The pseudonymous John Sandford, said to be a prize-winning Minneapolis journalist, made a fine debut in 1989 with “Rules of Prey,” which introduced Detective Lucas Davenport, who invents computer games in his spare time and can afford a Porsche as his car of choice.

In Shadow Prey (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: $18.95; 318 pp.), another punning title, Davenport confronts a small, shadowy band of Indians who, aiming to take revenge on a corrupt government official, stage a daring series of ritual assassinations to draw their ultimate target into the open.

Working in the crime genre called police procedurals, which embraces Gideon of Scotland Yard, Maigret and all of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct (to sketch the diversity within the genre), Sandford creates a cracklingly authentic atmosphere, a you-are-there sense of place, a sharp and sympathetic feeling for the urban Indian contesting an alien world, and the sound detailings of the police at work--interagency rivalries and dislikes included.

It is a vigorous entertainment, and while Davenport is colorful in his particulars, including the nun who talks philosophy and games with him, it is the larger story that commands the attention.

Everette Howard Hunt Jr. was a prolific novelist as well as a 20-year CIA worker before he became an aide in the Nixon White House, caught up in the Watergate scandal. He is now back to writing thrillers, and very successfully, too.

Murder in State (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s: $17.95; 288 pp.) is an espionage caper with the special strength that derives from an author’s close familiarity with the turf.

The theme, that the State Department is a hill of moles and the Soviets a subversive threat implacable as ever, has a very pre- glasnost ring about it. And while a character’s views are not necessarily those of the author, it seems clear enough that Adam Stuart, ex-State now content to fiddle with wills and trusts in Georgetown, is a carrier for some of Hunt’s attitudes.

Stuart grumbles that senators opposing the confirmation of a conservative general are “strutting midgets.” He had left State, he tells a senator’s aide, because “any little Fourth World country” could abuse the United States with impunity.

An old State Department pal comes to Stuart worried about leaks to the Soviets on the eve of arms-reductions talks in Geneva. He leaves Stuart a document about his fears and is shortly murdered. Stuart is recruited to the U.S. team at the talks and is soon the innocent abroad, kidnaped, drugged, on the run with a new identity, trying to discover who’s on whose side.

Hunt invents a cleverly tangled yarn, with a double-twist ending, heavy with irony, reaffirming the author/protagonist’s view that nothing changes and Red is a fade-proof color. Crime fiction is generally apolitical; thrillers are the most frequent exceptions and this is one.

The veteran journalist-commentator Rod MacLeish has a new thriller out that takes a more detached view of the post- glasnost world of espionage. In Crossing at Ivalo (Little, Brown: $18.95; 287 pp.), a dissident Russian officer, purporting to help a Jewish scientist flee Moscow for Israel, kidnaps him and offers him for ransom to both the United States and the U.S.S.R.

Jake Yarrow, an old and loyal CIA hand, heads up the American team to find the scientist, a Star Wars expert, before the Soviets do. There are double dealings in quantity, an expert assassin on the loose, a weak U.S. President whipsawed by a right-wing zealot, all leading to an unexpectedly quiet but no less suspenseful ending, near the Russian border at the Finnish town of Ivalo.

Within the novel, as sometimes happens in crime and thriller fiction, there is another kind of story implanted. The relationship between Yarrow and his estranged wife, and notably their conversations on the ghostly, tethering influence of long-dead parents, is embedded like a gemstone set in enamel. The shadow of Yarrow’s father is not irrelevant to the goings-on, but you have the feeling that the theme is one that MacLeish wanted to explore, someplace, as Hunt seems to have wanted to say he had not changed the rules of his patriot games.

Bino (as in albino) Phillips is a Dallas-sized defense attorney (6-feet-6) with very pale hair. In A. W. Gray’s In Defense of Judges (E. P. Dutton: $18.95; 328 pp.), Bino is asked, to his surprise, to be counsel for a tough but liberal judge who is threatened with indictment on trumped-up charges of bribe-taking.

The complications centrally include the judge’s beloved but drug-abusing daughter and an ambitious U.S. attorney who likes neither Bino nor the judge. Murder is both attempted and done, and Gray, said to have been both a professional golfer and gambler, keeps the pot boiling merrily. There is a secretary who is loyal, loving, sharp-tongued and crucially useful. Definitely post-Perry Mason, all of it.

Another and quite different lawyer, Brady Coyne of Boston, makes his ninth appearance in William G. Tapply’s Client Privilege (Delacorte: $16.95; 260 pp.). Coyne, who would rather be fishing--Tapply is a contributing editor of Field and Stream--is, like Bino, also asked to represent a judge, an impeccably honest sort who is being considered for the federal bench and who is at the same moment being blackmailed.

The judge is not into full disclosure, which makes Coyne’s work harder and the author’s work easier. Coyne meets the blackmailer, who shortly turns up dead, and who, bafflingly, was an expose-oriented anchor man on a struggling independent TV station.

Like many another fictional sleuth, Coyne has an attractive estranged wife whom he can’t live without, or with. She is pleasant when she’s around. Also in the great tradition, Coyne has to track through the past--a loyal secretary, a hidden pregnancy, family hatreds--to reach present truth, which is a smartly plotted surprise. Like many series, Tapply’s Coyne stories are swift, efficient and likable.

The imaginative young publishing firm of Carroll & Graf has exhumed seven longish short stories by G. K. Chesterton, most famous in the mystery field for his Father Brown stories. Seven Suspects (Carroll & Graf: $17.95; 204 pp.) includes “The Man Who Shot the Fox,” never before anthologized.

The moral is that Chesterton rests more comfortably with the Father Brown stories than with some of his theological apologetics. While the historian Howard Haycraft credits Chesterton with giving the mystery a more literary form, the evidence of these stories is that he made it more pompous and heavy-going, burying his small, paradoxical tricks in reams of not very lively prose. Exhumations are always a risk.