CRIMINAL PURSUITS

Patricia Cornwell has taken a controlling interest in the latest sub-genre of crime fiction: forensic procedurals. Cornwell’s third novel about Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Richmond’s chief medical examiner (All That Remains, Scribner’s: $20; 373 pp.), is already a bestseller, offered by three book clubs and two audiocassette firms.

As before, the abundant forensic detail, rich this time in the eloquent revelations of microscopic fibers and DNA analysis of blood and tissue, has a lurid fascination along with its impressive testimony about the new tools crime-solvers have on their side. Dick Tracy’s wrist radio no longer quite measures up.

A serial killer, operating over a period of years, with interruptions, has been knocking off couples, including a pair of young women, leaving them shoeless, bound and with a playing card as his trademark.

One recent victim is the daughter of a high-placed government woman, which puts uncommon and meddlesome pressure on Scarpetta, who is linked to the on-scene investigations through her friendship with Marino, a homicide detective. She is also den mother to a troubled niece and a woman reporter who is obsessively doing a book on the murders.

One of the possibilities, born of a gas credit card found near one of the victims, leads to the CIA and the specter of an agent who has let covert operations go to his head.

The tracking down is patient and almost continually surprising in both its small disappointments and partial triumphs for Scarpetta and company. The ending, with its one-two punch, is at once dramatic, inevitable, tragic and surprising.

But the larger significance of the book is that Cornwell seems to get better and better, surer in her delineations of characters and relationships, subtler in her plotting (serial killers are, so to speak, a dime a dozen in fiction these days; Cornwell makes hers only too credible).

First-person is always tricky; you are virtually certain the narrator has lived to tell about it. More than that, the narrator must always be there, or the story all takes place offstage. Cornwell has figured out how to free Scarpetta from the cadaver tables and get her out into the world. She is also making Scarpetta increasingly a woman of sensibility and deep concerns, able to be tough-minded, independent and soft-hearted at the same time.

The Scarpetta series is one of the best.

There’s nothing like writing about what you know. Cornwell has been a police reporter and worked in the medical examiner’s office in Richmond. Edna Buchanan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter on the Miami Herald who has now produced her fifth Miami-based thriller, Contents Under Pressure (Hyperion: $21.95; 277 pp.), powerfully toned like the earlier titles with a journalist’s information and perceptions.

The book introduces a new heroine, Britt Montero, a Cuban-American reporter for a Miami paper, and her peerless, fearless pal Lottie, a photographer for the paper.

The story could have come off the headlines. A black former football star, now a local hero for his selfless good works in the ghetto, is killed by the police late at night, allegedly for resisting arrest. Montero correctly smells racism and coverup and starts climbing over the department’s stone wall.

Events overtake her and she and Lottie are caught in a race riot of terrible ferocity. The riot is a sensational stretch of narrative writing, with an awful immediacy and power.

In many details, Montero is right in the mode of the new crime heroines: man-interested but not at the price of sacrificing independence to a stifling commitment. What is unique about her is her (Buchanan’s) close-up and engrossing acquaintance with present Miami in all its complexities and contrasts of race, wealth and worries.

It is said that Nicolas Freeling, a sometime chef, once did three weeks in jail for stealing food and used the time to begin his first novel. Thirty novels later, he is one of the most literate and idiosyncratic of crime writers who did that rare thing of killing off a successful series character, Commissaris Van der Valk, in “The Long Silence” in 1972. (Agatha Christie, who grew to loathe Poirot, must have envied him.)

He introduced a new character, Inspector Henri Castang, in “Dressing of Diamond” in 1974. He survives, thankfully, and in Flanders Sky (Mysterious: $18.95; 207 pp.) he has been both promoted and sacked, assigned to apparently meaningless advisory chores at the European Community headquarters in Brussels.

Castang is not, like Maigret, a legend in his own time but rather the nearest thing to a born loser, who solves his cases but always amid moral and political ambiguity and seldom at any credit to himself in the eyes of his superiors. He is consoled by a wonderful, no-nonsense wife, Vera, whose trip home to Czechoslovakia is one of those side issues that are occasional bonuses in the best crime fiction.

Castang’s boss is charged with the murder of his wife, and Castang must also cope with a pair of runaways from an abusive father. Seldom is a slim novel so dense with feelings, insights and characters seen in depth.

The Maxwells of Orange County, Ann and Evan, continue the adventures of their freewheeling free-lance investigator Fiddler and his ex-wife and present love, financial whiz Fiora. In The King of Nothing (Villard: $18; 294 pp.) they confront the death of a beloved salmon-fishing friend in Washington State. A part of his legacy to them is a Japanese ceremonial sword, World War II booty now sought (at any cost, murder included) by a Japanese tycoon who proves to be more and less than he seems.

As is their custom, the pair ricochet from tumult to tumult, concluding in yacht-to-yacht combat, very bloody indeed, on open water off Cape Flattery. Crisply professional, all the way.

No Deadly Drug (Pocket Books: $18; 247 pp.) is a collaborative effort by Tom Ferguson, an MD from Yale, and Joe Graedon, a pharmacologist whose “The People’s Pharmacy” is a best-selling reference work. Their novel, heavy with expertise, is about a young doctor’s efforts to solve a patient’s mysterious death from uncontrollable high blood pressure. The trouble appears to be a new drug that reacts badly with another substance or substances--but which?

The drug company all but kills him for his efforts, though the authors have an intriguing denouement for both the drug problem and the assaults. The characters, including the evil-doers, take a back Bunsen burner to the pharmacological information, which is considerable and interesting, if scary.

John Brady, Dublin-raised but living in Canada, evokes the city well in Kadish in Dublin (St. Martin’s: $18.95; 281 pp.). His protagonist, making his third appearance, is Matt Minogue, a detective in the Garda, Dublin’s police (who in their bureaucratic sensitivities and jealousies do not sound greatly different from the NYPD or LAPD).

A young Jew, son of a Dublin rabbi, is executed and a Palestine group no one ever heard of claims responsibility. Is it local antisemitism or something else? The else could be Opus Dei, an actual top-secret right-wing Catholic organization. The victim may have been investigating some rogue activities within Opus Dei.

Much conversation, earnest rather than colorful, and a leisurely pace detract only slightly from the exotic novelty of a Dublin setting Brady knows by heart, and from a thoughtful presentation of the city’s Jews, little remarked since Joyce wrote of Bloom.

Paula Gosling, an American living in England, picks a Great Lakes setting for her 11th novel, The Body in Blackwater Bay (Mysterious: $17.95; 291 pp.). Murder hits an elegant, change-resisting peninsula enclave where Detective Jack Stryker is recovering from a gunshot wound suffered in a previous caper. A reclusive new buyer, complete with bodyguards and watchdogs, has built at the end of the peninsula. How he relates to a takeover bid for the colony, let alone the bodies in the quicksand, is not immediately clear. A smooth, fast cozy, so-called, with the concentration of a proscenium drama.

Ladystinger by Craig Smith (Crown: $20; 232 pp.) is a tough thriller in the Jim Thompson roman noir tradition. A con lady, who picks up unwary businessmen in hotels, slips them a Mickey and then robs them, is herself picked up by a con man and coerced into helping him on a con bigger than both of them. The emotional contortions (can I trust him?) match the convolutions of the plot, with an uncommonly bloody final shoot-out. An expert debut by a former bookshop owner now writing them full-time in Little Rock.

Robert Barnard, long a leading social and political satirist among English crime writers, in A Fatal Attachment (Scribner’s: $20; 281 pp.) is less the satirist than the anatomist of an imperious woman, a biographer, who loves to manipulate the lives of the living as well as the dead. She manipulated one nephew to death in the Falklands and all but ruined the life of another by her unconcealed contempt. Now she’s adopting two young lads who pass her house en route to school.

She is, inevitably, done in for her dabblings, and the whodunit is far from easy to answer. Indeed, Barnard, one of the craftiest plotters extant, preserves a final twist for the last couple of paragraphs.