Criminal Pursuits

Ruth Rendell first came to attention with a series of police procedurals featuring Detective Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford of the village of Kingsmarkham. The series began with “From Doon with Death” in 1965 and continues now with the 15th title in the series, the first in four years, Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter (Mysterious Press: $19.95; 378 pp.).

(The title, from the Royal Navy, alludes to the old practice of lashing a sailor to the muzzle of a gun when he was to be flogged.)

Rendell began to space the Wexfords with novels in which psychological suspense was combined with craftily plotted bafflement. These are written both in her own name and as Barbara Vine, and her output, remarkable for its quantity, is the more remarkable for the quality of her imagination. She vies with P. D. James in popularity, but she is unmatched in her ceaseless powers of invention.

In the new novel, three members of a family are assassinated at the dinner table and a fourth, a young girl who is the child and grandchild of the other three, is gravely wounded.

As always, Rendell has provided far more than a simple sequence of events. The village, its inhabitants high and lowborn and its surroundings are revealed as in a poetic documentary. In a subplot not entirely unrelated to the main events, Wexford’s actress daughter is gaga over an arrogant and patronizing boor.

The explorations of the slaughter splay out in all directions, revealing not least that the family, dominated by a matriarch who wrote novels, was itself rife with dissent.

Toward the wounded and reticent young woman, Wexford feels an almost parental and protective kinship, as if to replace an estranged daughter. There is a full gallery of suspects (they go with the territory, rural or urban) and their motivations arise credibly out of their histories and out of relationships gone sour.

Rendell’s insights into the psychology (aberrant or merely unusual) of her characters have become a hallmark of her work, and it seems clear that the internal probings of the later novels have now influenced the style of the procedurals.

Her last-page denouements (dazzling astonishments of a kind Margaret Millar has done so well in this country) really are dazzling, but as you think about them they are seen to have a social and psychological inevitability. The clues had been nicely planted, along with the salted herring. The new book is at the top of Rendell’s very high standard.

A. (for Alfred) Alvarez is an English literary critic who has also published poetry, studies of suicide, divorce and compulsive gambling, and two “straight” novels. Day of Atonement (Random House: $21; 221 pp.) is, for want of a better handle, a superior crime thriller that is also (and perhaps primarily) a close study of a husband-wife relationship during a peculiar crisis.

He is a fashion photographer, she is a graphics designer, both fairly successful. They are Thatcherian yuppies, although more interested in pleasures than possessions. A raffish friend of the husband’s dies after a scrambling lifetime of shady deals in which the photographer sometimes participated as an investor.

The shady pal, it all too quickly appears, has left the couple a legacy that several quite unpleasant people want to intercept. The pal has done a profitable doublecross in a drug deal, and paid for it the hard way.

The prospects of sudden big money turn the couple inside out. Both drift into affairs that seem rather joyless acts of revenge on each other. Meantime, the heavies and some cryptic chaps from unlisted government agencies are tightening the screws on them to get to the stash.

Alvarez’s novel is, not surprisingly, an excellent piece of writing, told by the husband and wife in alternating chapters, and the author catches both voices with a fine accuracy. It is compact, swift, intimate and exciting.

Mary Higgins Clark has become the grande dame of American thriller writing. Her tenth, All Around the Town (Simon & Schuster: $21.50; 320 pp.) is, as is her custom, all plot, rushing headlong in brisk, brief chapters toward a slambam finish.

As Hitchcock did in his films, Clark creates a world of her own, not wholly like or unlike the real one, but so skillfully set up that suspending disbelief is not a problem except for the inordinately fussy.

A child, kidnapped at age 4 and released at age 6, suppresses all memory of the missing years but pays for the forgetfulness with a multiple-personality disorder. Now college age, she is accused of murdering a professor on whom one of her selves had a huge crush.

Her kidnappers, now big in television, fear she may remember too much, and begin scheming to drive her round the bend completely. Disbelief strains to accept how close the villains come, but the pace leaves little time to worry about details. Clark’s characters, like holograms, have visibility without depth, but, also like holograms, they are very entertaining to watch.

A name new to me although her third novel is just out is Janice Weber, a concert pianist whose first album and first book (“The Secret Life of Eva Hathaway”) both appeared in the mid-’80s. Frost the Fiddler (St. Martin’s: $19.94; 338 pp.), her first novel in five years, features Leslie Frost, a concert violinist who, between concertos, has a secret life as a secret agent.

Frost, last survivor of a team of agents who called themselves The Seven Sisters (she is code-named Smith), is controlled by a woman named Maxine, who fronts as a cabaret singer based in Germany.

Frost has as many lethal tricks as 007, including a plastic knife in her boot and a death pill inserted surgically beneath a lip mole, for situations in which death would be the lesser fate. Maxine also has access to computers that can answer anything up to and possibly including the voting figures in the Academy Awards.

The Fleming-like plot has Frost stumbling onto an assassination in Leipzig and finding a massive computer in a church steeple, programmed to call down destruction from a Soviet satellite.

The plot is thickened with details of concerts, recording sessions, petulant accompanists and villains in impresario garb, and all the detailings conspire to make the book’s second movement rather tedious going. But when Weber charges into the finale and all the villains take their last bows, there’s a good deal to cheer about. It remains true that a marvelously promising premise is stronger than the resulting story.

Simon Brett is the lightest-hearted of the English mysterians. His Charles Paris stories feature the heavy-drinking middle-aged actor who is forever quoting his own terrible reviews (“Paris’s Professor Higgins is the best argument I know against turning ‘Pygmalion’ into a musical”).

Paris, desperate for any work he can get, is, in Corporate Bodies (Scribner’s: $19; 189 pp.), doing an industrial film at a food company and trying to look workmanlike driving a forklift. A vampish young woman is crushed (accidentally, they say, though we know better) and Paris once again turns amateur sleuth.

The actor’s duellings with his unproductive agent, and his exchanges with the ex-wife he can’t live with or without are central to the charm of the series. The words “sheer entertainment” leap unbidden to mind as you read this small and gemlike tale.

With King of the Corner (Bantam: $20; 294 pp.), the Michigan writer Loren D. Estleman completes a decades-spanning trilogy about crime in Detroit that began with “Whiskey River” and continued with “Motown.”

Set in the present, the concluding volume features Doc Miller, an ex-Tiger ballplayer just out of prison after doing time because a girl overdosed at a victory party he was giving at a hotel. (She was the batboy’s date.)

Miller lives with an unsympathetic brother, drives a hack, becomes chauffeur to a bail bondsman, gets close to some sympathetic black activists, starts some kids (including a nephew) playing sandlot baseball. He is an enormously attractive character in an environment Estleman makes unutterably depressing in its despair, decay and political corruption.

Drugs, the universal corrosive these days, figure in the shooting of a policeman. Miller, fighting to get at the truth without violating his parole, generates a large amount of success because you’re rooting for him to beat the terrible odds surrounding him.

For a general readership, Estleman has provided an engrossing and characterful story. Closer to home, you have to figure he has raised some important hackles and should be wary of committing misdemeanors like jaywalking.

Brattleboro, Vt., emerges as a crime scene once again in the third of Archer Mayor’s first-rate regional novels, Scent of Evil (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 360 pp.).

Mayor’s Lt. Joe Gunther, first met in the series debut, “Open Season,” is a hard-working widower who seldom has a homicide to worry about. But Brattleboro is changing; it even has an influx of big-city types, and a drug scene.

A body turns up, partly buried in a river embankment. It’s a local fast-buck operator who had seemed to have found success in stock trading. He also proves to have had a hidden life of ornate seductions and recreational coke.

Nothing is simple. A small-time drug dealer is shot even as Gunther arrives to interview him. The police department turns out to be bugged; an elaborate stake-out goes sour, and the department is under fierce pressure from the city council. The complications keep abuilding.

Mayor has a way with white-knuckle final scenes, and he does it again in this atmospheric story whose gee-whiz events somehow retain their credibility, even in Brattleboro.

John Sandford, a no-longer concealed alias for Minneapolis journalist John Camp, has preyed for us three time previously (“Rules of Prey,” “Shadow Prey,” “Eyes of Prey”). In Silent Prey (Putnam: $21.95; 320 pp.), the rich detective Lucas Davenport continues his quest for the mad serial killer, Bekker, who first kills his victims and then destroys their eyes.

Bekker and the scene have shifted from Minneapolis to New York and there are complications, including corrupt cops and an attractive female detective named Fell. The book can’t be faulted for its powerful momentum and the acrid accuracy of the dialogue. It also seems like (but probably won’t be) a last gasp for a serial killer genre that is imperiled by its own grisliness. No matter that the killers are drawn from life, or are echoes of real life. They stretch the meaning of entertainment.

Like the late Elliott Roosevelt, Margaret Truman has enriched her mysteries with an insider’s knowledge of White House and Washington life. Murder at the Pentagon (Random House: $21; 288 pp.) is the 11th in her series of Washington thrillers.

This time her heroine is Margit Falk, Air Force helicopter pilot who is now a lawyer assigned to a Pentagon bureau. A weapons scientist is shot right in the Pentagon (where it hurts), and an Air Force major, who is gay, is indicted. Falk is assigned as his defense counsel.

The backdrop to these happenings is that an unnamed Middle East despot has just fired off a nuclear bomb, and the Pentagon, decompressing after the Gulf war and the Soviet dissolving, is recompressing on an emergency basis.

Falk quickly becomes convinced that the major is innocent, although when he is found hanged in his cell the matter is much confused. The plotting indeed is satisfyingly convoluted and the large-scale resolution worthy of a Ludlum.