CRIMINAL PURSUITS

The new breed of women private eyes can be dated from Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, introduced in “Edwin of the Iron Shoes” in 1977. Shar, as pals call her, was followed by Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, both born in 1982 in “A Is for Alibi” and “Indemnity Only,” respectively.

Muller has not yet, so far as I know, enjoyed the sales of either of the others nor a movie (“Warshawski,” with its smudged facsimile of the Paretsky original) but Muller is very, very good, in every way the equal of her compatriots, as she proves again in Where Echoes Live (Mysterious Press: $17.95; 326 pp.).

McCone is strong and resilient but also sensitive and introspective (and sometimes deeply alarmed by the lethal impulses she finds within herself). Like Warshawski, she has an active social conscience. In this outing, she is investigating strange doings at Tufa Lake and a near-ghostly mine town named Promiseville--for which read Mono Lake and Bodie, both evoked with loving care by Muller, a good reporter and eloquent writer.

Is a Hong Kong-owned conglomerate really going to get the mines going again? Environmentalists protest, and suspect fraud, and McCone is on their side. Muller constructs a fine cast of dubious do-gooders and local eccentrics, a violent trail that leads back to San Francisco (where McCone is investigator for a cooperative law firm) and back to the hills for an explosive ending.

Over her 11 outings, McCone has had a series of romances, one just fading out here but a possible new one that may figure in the next book. “Maybe as we get older our experiences don’t change us so much as make us more who and what we really are,” McCone says, a characteristically insightful remark by a character who deserves a wide readership.

The Christie Caper by Carolyn G. Hart (Bantam: $18; 317 pp.) gets honors for indefatigability if naught else. The setting is a weekend celebration at a South Carolina seaside resort in September, 1990, honoring the centennial of Agatha Christie’s birth. It is similar in theme if not in detail to the actual celebration held that month in Torquay, England.

By my count, Hart manages not only to mention 72 Christie titles at least once but to cite (enthusiastically) the names of at least 76 other crime authors from Edgar Allan Poe to Tony Hillerman.

The author’s protagonist and organizer of the fete is her series character and amateur sleuth, Annie Darling, who conveniently operates a mystery-book store. There is, of course, a plot, centering on the uninvited presence of a truly and even sensationally nasty critic, hated by one and all.

Despite the clever-enough plotting and the supreme wickedness of the bad guy (who gets his just deserts, we may be sure), the book is mostly a treat for Christie zealots, who get to prove their knowledge on various teasing quizzes. The protagonist and her vague, investigator husband Max are uninvolving to the point of transparency.

Back again and not a moment too soon is the emigre South African novelist, James McClure, who has featured the Afrikaner detective Lt. Tromp Kramer and his Bantu sergeant Mickey Zondi in seven previous novels, including “The Steam Pig” and “The Gooseberry Fool.” They are works of fiction that have made ground-level South Africa, and the relations between races there, more real than any actual reportage.

The Song Dog (Mysterious Press: $17.95; 275 pp.) is a prequel, dating from 1962 and the days before Nelson Mandela went to prison (he is mentioned; not involved) and re-creating the case on which Kramer and Zondi first met. It establishes, with sharp humor and a nice compassion, the admiring and affectionate relationship between two men united by work and divided by the country’s rules of race.

A bomb has leveled the Zululand house of a notoriously nymphomaniacal wife of a white settler, and it has killed along with her a local Afrikaner detective said to have been like Kramer in his unorthodox ways. The “song dog” is a mythical creature delivering cryptic but possibly helpful clues to a crone who helps the police in their inquiries from time to time.

Kramer and Zondi are on separate quests, and they and the quests do not so much intersect as collide head-on, in spates of wonderful dialogue and equally wondrous observations of Zululand flora, fauna and customs. Highest marks.

Loren D. Estleman’s Motown (Bantam: $19; 292 pp.) also is set in the 1960s, in a Detroit whose racial tensions are not that far distant from South Africa’s. The new book, second in an intended trilogy, is a sequel insofar as there are generational links to “Whiskey River,” which looked at the city in late Prohibition times.

As before, Estleman’s fictions are entwined with real events, including a minor race riot in 1966 that was a kind of prelude to the horrendous riots of 1967 in which 43 lives were lost. The fictional entwinings include a move by white gangsters to force blacks out of the numbers racket, and the hiring of a youthful-looking ex-cop to go undercover and discredit a citizens’ group (with Ralph Nader overtones) that has been attacking the safety records of Big Three cars.

Estleman works Elmore Leonard’s old turf without Leonard’s underwritten economy but with the same assured understanding of the territory from the governor’s office to a blind pig, and the same sure feeling for what makes suspenseful stories.

The Irish Troubles continue to be an endless source of high drama, rich in violence, betrayal, paranoia, handed-down rhetorical postures and a pervasive hopelessness. Joe Joyce, Dublin correspondent for the Guardian, caught the scene well in a first novel, “Off the Record.” His second, The Trigger Man (Norton: $18.95; 247 pp.), follows Fergus Callan as he slips back into the country from exile in the United States. He had fled after killing a man in a bungled ambush staged by the IRA.

Callan is an assassin but a reluctant one. He has been summoned back by a call for help from a colleague who saved his life after the ambush. But the authorities seemed to know he was due back even before he left Boston and he is on the run from the start. He is a man betrayed at every turn and gone to ground like many a hero of a Geoffrey Household novel. It is a dark story, ultimately mournful but absolutely engrossing, first page to last.

Chuck Freadhoff also is a journalist, now corresponding from Los Angeles for business magazines after years of reporting in Germany. His first novel, Codename: Cipher (Walker: $19.95; 240 pp.), draws on his German years to create a first-rate espionage thriller.

Masked men seize a U.S. Army nuclear storehouse in Germany to win the release of an Arab terrorist. Curious, because none of the invading terrorists appears to know Arabic. Freadhoff’s man, Jonathan Cane, himself now newspapering in Los Angeles, begs an assignment to cover the story because he knows the setting, his interest further whetted because the husband of an old love has been a hostage.

What the novel reaffirms is that the possibilities of Cold War espionage fiction did not come down with The Wall. The leftover animosities, and undiminished anti-Communist feelings, keep the pot boiling. Freadhoff takes an eventful yarn to an ironic conclusion.

Singapore Transfer (Viking: $17.95; 154 pp.) the third of Wayne Warga’s novels featuring writer/bookdealer Jeffrey Dean, departs Los Angeles for the mysterious East. Dean has a mysterious assignment to do a book for and about a high-powered Singapore financier. But before he can plug in his portable computer, his room has been searched, he’s rescued a fairly fair maiden from a robbery and is deeply involved in the elicit jade trade. The brief, swift text rushes to a well-evoked confrontation by night atop the U.S.S. Arizona monument in Pearl Harbor (a long way from Singapore, but Dean gets around). Dean, whose incidental notes on book-collecting always are interesting, is good company.

The essential plot--finding a missing sibling whose bone marrow might save a life--was used by another writer a couple of seasons ago. Independently and with significant variations it well serves Nancy Baker Jacobs in The Turquoise Tattoo (Putnam: $19.95; 239 pp.).

Her sleuth, Devon MacDonald, whose only child has been killed in an accident, is asked by a wealthy couple to find a bone-marrow donor to save their child’s life. MacDonald, reluctant to take on more grief, nevertheless agrees.

Years earlier, as a medical student, the father had earned money by donations to a sperm bank. Perhaps there would be records of a resulting birth. A thin trail at best, and who’d have said it would lead from Minneapolis, the principal setting, to murder, an Aryan supremacy group and Oregon? Jacobs, who teaches writing at Cal State Northridge, says who, and very readably too, with a strong sense of caring to help drive the plot.

Aaron Elkins, who lives in Washington State and whose series figure Chris Norgren is a curator at the Seattle Art Museum, takes him, in A Glancing Light (Charles Scribner’s Sons, $18.95, 243 pp.), all the way to Bologna, where a number of art treasures, stolen in three different robberies, may show up in the market. The FBI and its Italian counterpart have an idea Norgren can help lure the works out of hiding with the promise of big American bucks.

Elkins has researched the city, the art and the art detectives very well, and the book, more comfortable than frightening, is a lively diversion.