CRIMINAL PURSUITS

The techno-thriller, although its family tree may include “Frankenstein” and the works of Jules Verne, is the latest hot sub-genre of crime fiction, and in the hands of Michael Crichton, Robin Cook, Tom Clancy and a few others, now including Ridley Pearson, it has a mesmerizing urgency.

In Pearson’s Hard Fall (Delacorte: $20; 390 pp.), a terrorist with a personal rather than national or ethnic obsession has come to the United States with two super-sophisticated detonators, virtually undetectable before or after the plane crash. (“Hard Fall” is evidently a bureaucratic euphemism for a crash.)

Only a sympathetic FBI specialist (a sympathetic FBI agent being an anomaly in most current fiction) named Cameron Daggett has a clue who the terrorist is, or what specifically he might be up to. Daggett has his own obsession: His wife was killed and his young son crippled in a Lockerbie-like crash, presumably engineered by the terrorist’s small parent group, Der Grund.

Pearson, whose previous novel, “Probable Cause,” was also an expert thriller including some courtroom fireworks, intercuts between Daggett’s efforts (hamstrung by bureaucratic troubles) and the terrorist’s impeccable evasions and schemings. (He invades a Boeing-like plant in Seattle to plot a crash on a simulator.)

A successful composer-performer before he began writing fiction, Pearson lives in an Idaho log cabin and tells an irresistible tale.

Rebecca Rothenberg is an epidemiologist by profession and a botanist by hobby. No surprise, then, that the botanical lore she offers in her spellbinding first mystery, The Bulrush Murders (Carroll & Graf: $18.95; 235 pp.) reads very professionally indeed.

The unusual setting is a remote U. of California agricultural experiment station in the citrus and stone-fruit stretches of the San Joaquin Valley, well beyond Fresno. Rothenberg’s protagonist, Dr. Claire Sharples, a mid-30ish, MIT-trained microbiologist, has come west to trade the gray routines and confinements of the lab for field work and a chance for independent recognition.

What she meets is unreconstructed male chauvinism enriched by anti-Eastern attitudes and compounded by the loneliness and the insufferable and unaccustomed heat. But there’s a compensating challenge: Brown rot, seemingly resistant to chemicals, is attacking a particular peach orchard and sparing others. Suspiciously, the orchard belongs to a Hispanic family whose small holding sits amid a vast (and arrogantly Waspy) corporate farm, and Sharples proves at some risk to be a researcher outside the lab as well as in.

The tense and unhackneyed story advances on several fronts. There is, not least, the rising heat of Sharples’ feelings toward Sam Cooper, a fellow scientist unconsciously alluring in his aloofness. At darker levels, racial tensions, family strife, multiple levels of greed, and hatreds dating from Vietnam days add urgency to Rothenberg’s intricate and action-rich plot.

At the story’s center, always, is an affecting and insightful portrait of a bright woman struggling for simple equality in an environment as prickly and hostile as some of the wild grasses the author describes so well. Rothenberg is reportedly at work on a Sharples-Cooper sequel. That’s welcome news: Rothenberg is a skilled and notably individual new voice in the mystery field.

Tony Gibbs, whose first two mysteries, “Dead Run” and “Running Fix,” drew on his experience as a sailor and editor of Yachting magazine, could hardly have gone further afield (or ashore) than with Shadow Queen (Mysterious Press: $17.95; 326 pp.).

A packet of letters has turned up. They are ostensibly the originals of the so-called Casket Letters, said to have proved that Mary Queen of Scots was a villainess who conspired in the murder of her own husband, Darnley. The letters were tracked down by a writer of historical romances (a Patrick masquerading as Patricia), who hopes his publisher will buy them for a huge price.

But such back-o’-the-throne goings-on! The writer is being blackmailed by the IRA to give its operatives a hunk of the advance; the chief plotter is a British double agent who goes inopportunely free-lance. And there are assorted other traitors, villains and dupes.

Coping with all the maneuverings is Diana Speed, the tough top editor of a the publishing firm owned by a Murdock-like figure called the Rajah.

The papers (in a plot not handily summarized, as you may well believe) have been kept by a semi-mad hag in Queens who has some genealogical reason to believe her daughter ought to be on the British throne and who has trained the girl (a teen-ager of appealing innocence) accordingly. The tutoring has left her deeply confused, but perhaps not permanently.

The novel is a feat of literary legerdemain, making such preposterous events credible (within the limits of fiction, of course) and in turn unpredictable and suspenseful.

Gibbs, who was once the executive editor of the New Yorker, almost incidentally creates the atmosphere of a major publishing house to the last bitchy volleying of the infighters.

Philip Kerr, who customarily toils at a London ad agency, writes especially well about Germany and a former Berlin cop named Bernie Gunther, who does what he has to do to keep going in the rubble of early postwar. In A German Requiem (Viking: $19.95; 307 pp.), Gunther is hired by a Russian colonel to go to Vienna, where one of Gunther’s former associates is on trial for murdering an American officer.

Within the usual who’s-on-first double-dealings of espionage fiction lies a germ of historical truth: the claim (denied) that ex-Nazis were given new identities to help U.S. counterintelligence keep tabs on the Russians. Kerr accepts the claim, not the denial, and has Gunther penetrate some of the old boys’ new maskings.

Ralph McInerny, who invented the Father Dowling series and who teaches medieval studies at Notre Dame, has in Easeful Death (Atheneum: $19.95; 211 pp.) created an ingenious puzzle that is a character study as well. Howard Webster, a published but not greatly honored poet, seemingly burns himself to death on his Wisconsin farm.

In truth he has swapped with a homeless itinerant who did die. Secure in a new life and identity in Italy, Webster finds that he has won posthumously the fame denied him while he lived--though the acclaim rests largely on a new work he didn’t actually write.

He is drawn back to Wisconsin, fame being hard to ignore. But how to handle his reemergence, if any? It’s a wonderful premise, and even so, McInerny’s complications have only begun. There is, for example, the 300-pound Webster devotee who ultimately makes it all clear, for example.

McInerny’s dizzyingly convoluted but remarkably economical tale is a tour de force, a sharp commentary on literary reputation.