It’s summertime and the big guns, criminally...

It’s summertime and the big guns, criminally speaking, are making timely appearances to extend the easeful pleasures of hammock or waterside.

Tony Hillerman’s Coyote Waits (Harper & Row: $19.95; 292 pp.) is not, I think, the best of his books. But his evocation of Navajo land, the look of it, the sounds and the silences of it, is strong and compelling as ever.

His presentation of Navajo myth and its persistence into a time of auto exhaust and spray paint remains a unique and engrossing element in current mystery fiction. The waiting coyote is a mythic variant on the devil, seeking whom he may devour when vigilance and goodness falter.

Hillerman’s plot this time reads more cluttered and forced than earlier stories. The senior Joe Leaphorn and brash young Jim Chee are at cross purposes over the shooting and burning of a tribal policeman who was Chee’s friend and whose murder Chee guiltily feels he could have, should have prevented. Women, present or remembered, are in the text, engagingly drawn although they cannot escape seeming like concessions to the dictates of the genre.

The crime appears at first to be no mystery at all. A very drunk old Indian, found weapon in hand, is only too eager to confess his guilt and his shame. But both men sense there may be a back story, something that hasn’t met the eye. They’re right, of course, and it could even involve an alternate version of the last days of Butch Cassidy.

Hillerman, always a very adroit taleteller, cuts between Chee’s explorations and Leaphorn’s as their paths cross, recross, converge. There is a kind of sub-finale in the rocks and a revelation in court.

What is clear at last is that Hillerman’s story is not least a parable, forceful and poignant, on what alcohol can do and has done to the Indian soul. It is here only one element in a complicated story rooted in ambition and greed. But it lingers in memory, as the author intended it should. Hillerman, even off his peak, is still in a class by himself.

I’m increasingly convinced that Robert B. Parker motivates himself by writing only when he is both hungry and thirsty, thus the continuing and loving attention to food and drink in his books. He is back among us with a very readable entry called Stardust (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, $18.95; 256 pp.), which was undoubtedly informed by Parker’s own exposures to series television.

Spenser is hired as temporary bodyguard to a temperamental, drugged-out, boozed-out actress who is filming a television series on location in Boston. Someone is evidently trying to make even more of a mess of the actress’ life than she has herself.

If there’s a theme running through Parker’s series it is that Spenser is drawn to the victims of abuse: abused and ignored children, a star athlete abused by a cynical and exploitative society. His Jill Joyce is at first sight far from sympathetic, but Spenser rightly figures that no one gets that self-destructive for no reason, and a murder proves the threats are not fantasies. The answers lie in an unpleasant past. As in earlier books, Parker helps the client define a future that will, with a little will power, be better.

The hyperprolific Ed McBain is back with his ninth Matthew Hope novel, Three Blind Mice (Arcade/Little Brown: $17.95; 298 pp.). Hope is a Florida lawyer whose capers all have fairy-tale titles, from “Goldilocks” to “The House That Jack Built.”

The three blind mice are Vietnamese refugees, accused but acquitted of the rape of a prominent farmer’s wife. They are then murdered and mutilated and the victim’s husband is inevitably arrested, and inevitably becomes Hope’s client.

I confess that I spotted killer and motivation hardly three chapters in. I don’t generally try to out-sleuth the sleuths, and the delight in a certain kind of mystery is simply in being surprised. The only surprise here was that I turned out to be right. There are minor twists, and as always, McBain’s ear for dialogue and eye for detail are in good working order. But the redolent atmosphere cannot overcome the transparency of plot.

New voices are always gratefully heard. Janet Smith’s first mystery, Sea of Troubles (Perseverance Press/Capra: $8.95, paper; 197 pp.), is a fully charactered, cleverly plotted, active and atmospheric thriller set in the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound.

Smith, a lawyer now an administrative law judge in Seattle, has as her protagonist Annie MacPherson, who is of all things a Seattle lawyer. Annie heads out from Friday Harbor to negotiate the sale of a resort hotel for a client. The curmudgeonly buyer’s popsie companion disappears, evidently kidnaped. The reader knows the kidnaping is faked. Then the plotters are themselves bumped off, and the reader doesn’t know what to believe, which is always nice in the genre.

Annie herself nearly buys it when she is dumped from a kayak into the icy water, suspicion falling on a man she thinks she newly loves. Smith’s book honors the classic tradition with its richness of suspects and its tidy denouement. But it also has a youthful vigor and a good deal of well-described action. No armchair deducting here.

Susan Kelly has published three mysteries prior to Until Proven Innocent (Villard: $16.95; 276 pp.), so she is only comparatively a new voice, but she is a welcome discovery for me. Her milieu is Cambridge and Boston, and she is said to have taught crime reporting at the Cambridge Police Academy and communications at the Harvard Business School.

She joins the new elite of women writing about women sleuths operating in a climate of unvarnished social realism. Her heroine is a former college professor who is now a free-lance writer of true-crime articles. (Nobody said it wasn’t smart to start with what you know best.)

Liz Connors is the beloved of a Cambridge detective, Jack Lingemann, who is jailed on the charge of murdering a woman. It is nonsense to Connors and anyone who knows him well, but politics are a prime ingredient of crime and punishment and it would be unpolitic to let him out on bail.

Connors, with help from some newspaper pals and a couple of cops loyal to Lingemann, has to track back through an immensely tangled past--old crimes, old resentments, old villainies--and a hardly less tangled present to discover what the frame-up and some ancillary misdeeds are all about.

Kelly has her turf and characters down accurately to the last ambiguity, meaning those moments when even his associates can’t be sure the detective hasn’t fallen from grace just this once. It’s a superior piece of work.

Magdalen Nabb, an Englishwoman, has lived in Florence since 1975 and is writing a terrific series about a dumpy, bulging-eyed, reticent Florentine detective, Marshall Guarnaccia.

In The Marshall’s Own Case (Scribner’s, $17.95, 175 pp.), the marshal is asked to investigate the murder and particularly grisly dismembering of one of the city’s colony of transsexual prostitutes, Lulu, born Luigi but having, at the hour of his death, voluptuous Silicon breasts.

The marshal’s initial shock and revulsion at exploring this unfamiliar world, so distant from his own stolid existence, soon changes to sympathy for the streetwalkers and the terrors, perils and sadnesses of the life style.

As an exercise in mystery and detection, Nabb’s book is as always fine and satisfying. As a piece of reportage of an exotic stratum of an exotic city, the book is remarkable for its warm compassion as well as its credibility. The reader joins the marshal on his journey to understanding.