CRIMINAL PURSUITS

Sara Paretsky has hit the big time: Profiled in magazines, a movie based on her series character V. I. Warshawski (not a very good movie, but not Paretsky’s fault, either), her seventh Warshawski novel a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection and an alternate at two other clubs. A professional athlete would worry about the jinxing possibilities of such attention.

But Guardian Angel (Delacorte: $20; 374 pp.) is probably the best of the Warshawski novels so far: the most driven, the most eventful, the most revealing of Warshawski as an independent and free-spirited woman contending in a world she finds corrupt a lot of the time and chauvinist most of the time.

The contradiction that Paretsky works so well is that Warshawski is both the most hard-boiled and the most tough-mouthed of the conspicuous women in current crime fiction, yet also the most demonstrably concerned and compassionate (and needful of male TLC in return).

She is moved to action in the new story because yuppie neighbors have had an elderly woman’s cherished dogs destroyed after she is hospitalized. Anyone capable of such a thing is up to no good, and we know it from the start. V. I. and we may well ask why the yuppie lawyer moved so quickly to become the old woman’s legal guardian, why so desperate to find her papers?

Paretsky’s plots diverge quickly but always logically, multiplying like the tracks in a switching yard. And so it logically transpires that she is soon swinging from a gantry crane in a warehouse, hotly pursued; leaping into a polluted South Chicago canal, hotly pursued; breaking into her smarmy ex-husband’s law office disguised as an electrician and, not for the first time, hotly pursued.

The author has few peers as a plotter, but always to the end of revealing dramatically the society from its corroded top to its beleaguered bottom, with kindness to be found in unexpected niches somewhere in between.

No one conveys better than Paretsky such moments as the sudden silence that follows a stranger’s appearance in a neighborhood saloon, the fear and hostility that cling like stale smoke behind locked doors in a rough neighborhood. In the posh suburbs, the smug rich, with much to hide, are impaled like butterflies. A capacity for evil runs through Paretsky’s world like a fissure through rock strata. Her view is not as much politicized as anti-political at all levels, distrustful of almost everything except the courageous individual, like Warshawski.

Seldom before has Warshawski’s anguish at her solitariness (self-imposed as it is) been so clear, and so affectingly presented. Her closest friend, a German woman who runs a clinic, has been endangered and wounded because of Warshawski, and they are now estranged (temporarily, the reader hopes). The investigator is being comforted by a concerned and attractive black policeman (the reader suspecting that this, too, is temporary).

The current set of miscreants get their various comeuppances. But because the rages and despairs have gone so deep, the patchings-up of society look themselves like temporary bastings, and Warshawski’s half-waking dreams are uneasy rather than contented.

Paretsky gets better and better, the stories at once more imaginative and more personal, giving not a sign that laurels are being rested upon.

If Paretsky’s work grows richer, so does John Katzenbach’s. He made his debut with “In the Heat of the Summer” in 1982 while he was still a Miami newspaperman. He now writes books full-time from a base in Massachusetts but his turf is still Florida.

Just Cause (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: $22.95; 431 pp.) could, I expect, be called a press procedural as well as a police procedural. His protagonist is again a reporter, Matt Cowart, now writing editorials against the death penalty. He receives a letter from a black man on Death Row, protesting his innocence, spelling out how his confession was beaten out of him and--tantalizingly--insisting that he knows who actually did the bestial killing of a white schoolgirl.

The black, Ferguson, uppity in local eyes because he went north to college, is coolly determined to get his conviction overturned. The real killer, he says, is also on Death Row, convicted of serial killings. The Bible-quoting killer, presumably with nothing now to lose, steers the reporter to the murder weapon, buried in a culvert’s sludge. Ferguson is freed on bail to await a new trial.

The events are the stuff of melodrama, but they occur in settings whose sights, sounds and procedures have the authenticity of fine reporting. The racial temper in a small town, which made the original trial a legal lynching that the reporter forestalled, is well-caught. So are the personalities of the local cops, first seen as bullies, then as far more complex men than that. Justice is not so much served as achieved just outside the law. The old line about a book that is impossible to set aside is wonderfully apt here.

B. M. Gill, a woman who lives in Wales, writes with the same quiet grace and attention to the nuances of character as does P. D. James, although she is far less well known here. Her eighth novel, The Fifth Rapunzel (Scribner’s: $19.95; 240 pp.), centers on a teen-ager whose parents have just been killed in an automobile accident.

He wants simply to be let alone to readjust, but nothing is simple. A young woman, purporting to be a journalist, invades his space on the dubious pretense that she is writing a story. Her interest is in his father, a forensic scientist who sent a serial killer to prison. The boy’s distant mother was intermittently a patient at a mental hospital up the road.

The book is a gradual and rather oblique exploration of the messy lives the accident ended, and some peculiar legacies that lived on. It also qualifies as a rather unusual coming-of-age story, the boy managing a kind of English-countryside, sixth-form version of “Home Alone,” without quite realizing how imperiled he is. After the strenuous doings of the Paretsky and Katzenbach, Gill’s sensitive exploration of quite nasty but relievingly muted transactions is a quiet pleasure.

Having run through six weekdays, a Sunday and a someday, Harry Kemelman takes The Day the Rabbi Resigned (Fawcett Columbine: $20; 273 pp.) as the text for the ninth appearance of Rabbi David Small of the small Massachusetts city of Barnard’s Crossing, just outside Boston and not unlike Marblehead, where the author, now 84, has lived.

From the first of the series (“Friday the Rabbi Slept Late”) in 1964, the local color, the personality of the rabbi and his relations with his congregation and the community have meant more to the success of the series than the mysteries as mysteries. It is certainly true in this autumnal work.

The leaders of the congregation want to give the rabbi a gift on his 25th anniversary, but what do you give a man who wants nothing? What the rabbi wants in any event is to resign and then teach. At what seems some distance from these matters, an unliked local professor gets tanked at a faculty dinner, smacks a tree on the way home and dies.

There are peculiarities: The prof was alive when the first Samaritan found him and went for help, but dead later when help came, and his fancy watch is missing. A faculty rival is a suspect. Then, too, the prof’s home life proves to have been quite dangerously bizarre. The rabbi’s insights, which help unknot the mystery, are useful as ever, but more than ever they run second to the rabbi’s light, bright sermonettes on Judaism and the rabbinical life. As in 1964, it is the charm that matters, and it is still there.

Joe Monninger’s Incident at Potter’s Bridge (Donald I. Fine: $19.95; 262 pp.) is a swift-moving thriller set at a small New England college where a coed is brutally murdered and then scalped by a person unknown. The novel’s opening sentence, a true stopper, suggests how the person unknown got that way. “The day George Denkin killed his mother was like any other day,” Monninger writes. Somehow little George escapes all the usual psychiatric nets and tests and grows up to be a campus clerk, a loner as invisible as any visible thing can be.

His victims are young women with long hair, and he would likely still be at it but for a pair of nervy boys who see too much from a tree hut, and a young woman who is nearly the last victim. Monninger tells a scary story, with a scalp-tingling finale. If he does not really look very deep into any of the characters, that is not the object of his exercise.

It seems a month for real loonies, and John Westermann, a policeman-writer in the Wambaugh tradition, creates in Sweet Deal (Soho: $18.95; 229 pp.) a truly far-out loony with a taste for life-sized toy soldiers. Westermann’s protagonist, Jack Mills, is a good-looking ex-jock, most of whose police life has been spent posing for posters and speaking to civic groups. But sweet deals sour, and Mills has talked his way into homicide, for which he has no discernible talent.

Like Wambaugh, Westermann creates a lively if disturbing picture of laziness, incompetence, jealousy, criminality and other fallings-short among the lads in blue, although there are also glimpses of bravery and genuine anger at the death of colleagues. But the dark side prevails right up to the final siege of a crazy who once wore the blue himself. Westermann is good but has been better.

English writer John Malcolm knows his way around the London art world, and in Sheep, Goats and Soap (Scribner’s: $19.95; 224 pp.), the eighth in a series starring Tim Simpson, an art dealer and sleuth of sorts, Malcolm provides an abbreviated glimpse of the world of the pre-Raphaelite painters, along with a nicely atmospheric mystery.

A scruffy acquaintance from university days writes Simpson a cryptic letter hinting that he has latched on to a pricey pre-Raphaelite work that Simpson might want to buy. Simpson hies off to a cabin the pal has used on the Channel coast at Hastings. The pal is long gone but the sea cliff has been dynamited out from under the cabin and there are corpses in the wreckage.

It’s clear that a scam has turned murderous; one of the dead is a Japanese buyer. Simpson puts on his sleuthing cap and, with the help of a lady friend who knows a forger’s style when she sees it, runs the pal to ground--not before further lethal happenings, however. For all the gore, politely understated, Malcolm tells a lightly agreeable tale, and the incidental music about the painters is not less interesting for being gossip a century old.