CRIMINAL PURSUITS

Julie Smith’s “New Orleans Mourning” won the 1991 Edgar as best novel from the Mystery Writers of America. It was a New Orleans-based thriller that introduced Margaret (Skip) Langdon, a heroic-sized homicide detective not sure she likes her work (her family certainly doesn’t). Langdon returns in The Axeman’s Jazz (St. Martin’s: $19.95; 341 pp.), in which she is on the trail of a serial killer whose victims all appear to have been recruited from 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, thus complicating the problem of tracing their full identities.

The serial killer is currently an all-too-frequent sub-genre of crime fiction, yet it holds its ground because writers like Smith keep finding new dimensions in it. Smith’s killer writes to a newspaper linking himself to a real-life New Orleans serialist from the 1920s who called himself the Axeman. In the end, the letter killeth, helping Smith pinpoint a villain whose first murder triggered an ever-madder spree.

Smith, a former Times-Picayune reporter now resident in Berkeley, catches New Orleans from blues in the night to beignets at dawn. And she gives her suspects as well as her victims valid psychological underpinnings so they don’t seem mere figures on a board. Some readers whose lives have been turned around by the 12-step approach may feel Smith has treated some lesser-known programs (or their adherents) cavalierly. But in the end, both the pain and the helping seem clear enough.

Nigel Williams has been reviewed as England’s “best comic novelist,” a seeding that devotees of Kingsley Amis (among others) might challenge. But Williams is damned funny and no mistake. The Wimbledon Poisoner (Faber & Faber, Winchester, MA.: $19.95; 307 pp.) begins, “Henry Farr did not, precisely, decide to murder his wife. It was simply that he could think of no other way of prolonging her absence from him indefinitely.”

Hard not to keep reading.

Farr, a fat, dull, suburb-dwelling lawyer, indeed sets out to poison the lady, knocks off the family doctor instead, fancies himself a legendary killer from his very town and becomes (to his own bafflement) a kind of aide to the local homicide detective, an odd sort named Rush.

Williams has many a bizarre turn awaiting in his grandly entertaining black comedy, and the wealth of invention (not least Henry’s mad funeral oration for the dead physician) is extravagant. All that, and a ludicrously happy ending.

Paul Bishop, another Los Angeles policeman who writes, and who has also played competitive soccer here and in England, has, in Chapel of the Ravens (Tor: $18.95; 310 pp.) done for his game what William Murray and Dick Francis have done for the ponies.

His protagonist, Ian Chapel, is a world-class goalie who lost an eye in a Cup match and has been working as an investigative magazine editor (with a secret-service past). He’s recruited to play again for a new professional soccer team in Los Angeles, the goaltending to cover his looking into the murder of the previous goalie.

There’s plotting aplenty--not least the presence on the team of the German player who kicked Chapel’s eye away. There are as well the owner’s malevolently feuding daughters, some Irish toughs and a mysterious link to an IRA offshoot, and a further subplot underlying all that. But, like Francis describing a steeplechase from horseback, Bishop is at his best describing violent action--the most violent of it here in the ruthless practice sessions and then in the playoffs themselves. A few more books like his and soccer might find the huge American audiences it deserves.

Sister Carol Anne O’Marie is a San Francisco nun of the order of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. Murder in Ordinary Time (Delacorte: $18; 244 pp.) is her fourth novel featuring Sister Mary Helen, who can’t help solving mysteries. Sister Mary Helen is somewhere in her 70s (choosing not to remember exactly) and seems to have been modeled after a nun in Los Angeles (who has denied it, with a sly grin).

Mary Helen, invited to be on a local television show, has hardly stepped into the studio when an anchorwoman dies of a poisoned cookie. The good sister sorts it all out, but the sorting out has less to do with the novel’s appeal than its humane warmth, gentle humor and its ability to give goodness more than equal time with evil, in a kind of theological cozy.

Gerald Petievich, the former Secret Service agent whose novels include “To Live and Die in L.A.,” has turned to the espionage tale with spectacularly readable consequences. In Paramour (E. P. Dutton: $19.95; 294 pp.), set in the near future (Bush has decided not to run in 1992; we are probably in 1996), Jack Powers, a secret agent on White House duty, is assigned to check out a woman with whom the President is allegedly having an affair, and who may be a spy--a double agent, because she works for the CIA.

Powers is drummed out of the corps because he loses his quarry in Germany, to which she has fled, apparently en route to exile in Syria. Eventually discredited as a madman, Powers (in a remarkable set-piece by the author) breaks into Camp David and the President’s study for a one-on-one confrontation.

It’s “You-can’t-trust-anybody-anymore” spy-telling at its fast, surprise-strewn best, all enriched by Petievich’s close knowledge of Secret Service procedures, policies and linguistics.

A Woman’s Eye (Delacorte: $19; 446 pp.), edited and with an introduction by Sara Paretsky, is a selection of 21 new stories by an honor roll of women now writing crime fiction, including Paretsky herself, Sue Grafton, Amanda Cross, Antonia Fraser, the veterans Dorothy Salisbury Davis and Dorothy B. Hughes, Faye Kellerman and Nancy Pickard.

What the collection demonstrates again and again is that the gift that women bring to the crime form is a piercing insight to the violence of the heart, the smoldering resentments of one human toward another, the betrayals (real or imagined) that, no less than greed or envy, lead to the ultimate sin of murder. The stories, all at a high level of freshness and sensitivity, form a kind of collective testimonial.

Ed McBain, as reliable as storytellers ever get, gives us in Downtown (William Morrow: $20; 302 pp.) the very funny, not crushingly sad story of a perfectly decent orange-grower from Florida with two last hours to kill before he heads for J. F. K. and home. In a pleasant bar, he is gulled by a fake detective and a tasty blonde, robbed, becomes a murder suspect, is shot at, beaten up, kidnaped, chased by an insane assortment of good guys and bad guys (not easy to tell apart), and forced to be a poor man’s Mike Hammer. McBain confirms every visitor’s darkest forebodings about Manhattan. A first-rate diversion, since we’re only watching.

Pasadena’s Jim Stinson, a jack-of-all-film-and-television-trades, created in Stony Winston a very close alter ego, a jack-of-all-film-and-television-trades. In TV Safe (Charles Scribner’s: $19.95; 246 pp.), Winston is laboring as a question writer on a quiz show called “O-Pun Sesame,” in which the contestants have to give a punning answer. (“What’s a thousand-pound gorilla with indigestion?” Expected answer: “Kong With the Wind.” They don’t get any better.) The show’s star is not the host but the dizzy blonde who delivers the right answers the contestants miss.

The blonde draws troubles like molasses draws flies. A contestant is bumped off. So is a photographer. There are hints the blonde is being blackmailed. Winston, with his reputation as an amateur sleuth, is asked to investigate.

Story and plot are on the fragile side, but as always Stinson gives good atmosphere and credible detail. Here he handles a difficult plot twist with welcome restraint.

Paul Levine, the Miami lawyer whose debut novel, “To Speak for the Dead,” introduced Miami lawyer Jake Lassiter and his pal, a cantankerous old forensic scientist named Charlie Riggs, featured a bit of grave-robbing to solve a case. The pair of them are back in Night Vision (Bantam: $17.95; 342 pp.), a much more heavily plotted piece that moves from Miami to London, with excursions to the time of Jack the Ripper and to Vietnam.

Computer hackers who get their kicks talking dirty to each other via their modems feature early on in setting up a murder and the mystery. Who sent the unfinished list of questions about an incident in ‘Nam, and to whom and why?

The pursuits of truth are leavened by Doc Riggs’ rather ghastly reminiscences, as of the dummy in the carnival’s haunted house that was no dummy. The new book is a lively adventure, but as Lassiter gets farther away from present Miami and the excitement of the courtroom, the sense of plot contrivance grows stronger and undercuts the immediacy the debut novel had (as plotty as the grave-robbing was).