CRIMINAL PURSUITS

Abigail Padgett’s Child of Silence (Mysterious Press: $17.95: 196 pp.) is a sensationally fine first novel by a San Diego writer who has been a court investigator and is now an advocate for the mentally ill. Both strands of her life are reflected in her heroine, Bo Bradley, who looks into child-abuse cases for the court and tries to conceal “the hound of hell deep inside her”--the manic-depressive illness that has already claimed the life of her sister.

Like the battles with alcoholism that some male mystery characters wage (e.g., James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux), Bradley’s fears of the onset of delusions double the story’s tension and, not so incidentally, give readers insights into private terrors even more moving than the events of the plot.

Padgett’s plot is moving enough, physically and emotionally. A 4-year- old child is found tied up and abandoned on a small Indian reservation near San Diego. He is thought to be retarded, but Bradley realizes he is deaf, as her late sister was.

Then two killers attempt to murder the child. Murder a deaf child? Yes, and when the first try fails there are others. Bradley herself is imperiled and forced to flee with the child to an Indian settlement near Lone Pine.

Few chases in my recent reading have been so suspenseful, and the last confrontation in an abandoned mine is breathtakingly well told. Padgett, who is also a student of Native American culture, seasons her story with it handsomely. If she can sustain the level of her debut, Padgett will be a voice to hear again and again.

John Wilkes is a New York defense attorney who would defend a Dracula with fresh blood on his fangs if the price was right. He makes his second appearance in Wilkes on Trial (Ballantine: $18; 298 pp.) by Charles Sevilla, himself a San Diego defense attorney.

Wilkes is to Horace Rumpole as Kojak is to Adam Dalgliesh, divided by cultural differences even vaster than the ocean but evidently united in their shrewd trickeries and their abiding dislike of judges. Indeed, Wilkes’ attitude toward judges, as recorded by his junior partner and presumed amanuensis, Winston Schoonover, make the recent spate of scurrilous lawyer jokes seem as mere valentines.

In the present instances, Wilkes gains acquittal for a street-gang leader who has (so far as the reader can tell) raped a young blind woman. He also defends the top-heavy sexpot who runs a kind of red-light hot tub (a lead-heavy sequence suggesting the author has detected a mammary fixation among his readers). He is cited for multiple contempts by a judge who turns up stabbed to death in his chambers, with Wilkes himself a prime suspect.

It is one of the least mysterious mysteries around, but it is the sound track that matters, as it is intended to, and those who take a dim view of lawyers and the administration of justice will find a jokey, confirming solace in Sevilla’s satirical pages.

For a sharp change of place, there is Michael Dibdin’s Cabal (Doubleday: $18.50; 241 pp.), third in a series starring a Roman detective named Aurelio Zen. Dibdin, a Britisher who lived and taught in Italy for four years, clearly knows Rome, Milan and Vatican City with a native’s close familiarity.

A count of impressive ancestry and dubious reputation falls to his death from the basilica of St. Peters. Suicide it’s not, but the Vatican would as lief hush it all up. A related death occurs outside the Vatican. That one wasn’t suicide either, and the hushing has to stop.

Is there a Cabal, possibly a cell within the Knights of Malta, behind these and subsequent deaths? All the while trying to keep his romance together and his dotty mother pacified, Zen, shrewd but engagingly anti-heroic, handles the Vatican brass with appropriate gingerliness and follows a curious trail to Milan.

The telling of the back story is uncharacteristically flat-footed but the final moments have a fine and crashing symmetry, and Dibdin, who now lives in Oxford, creates a flavorful Italian atmosphere.

Events growing out of the turbulent ‘60s continue to fascinate authors, and Campbell Armstrong is yet another of them. His A Concert of Ghosts (HarperCollins: $20; 239 pp.) is one of the scariest of the lot.

Harry Tennant, a ‘60s refugee, is growing marijuana in comfortable solitude in the Pacific Northwest when he is busted with an odd deliberation that does not really seem normal narc vigilance.

Then there is the defense attorney who shows up to help but who disappears and whom none of the locals ever saw before. And there is the pretty writer who shows up, eager to identify the other figures in a ‘60s news photo of Harry.

All strange, and compounded by the fact that there are woozy gaps of enormous duration in Harry’s memory. The couple do a long search cross-country into the past, into memory and into a rotten present. The revelations are at last bleakly awful, with echoes, improbably, of both the film “Parallax View” and Waugh’s “A Handful of Dust.”

Avram Cohen is a Holocaust survivor and a Jerusalem detective, off to Los Angeles where his closest friend and fellow survivor has become a Hollywood producer. In Robert Rosenberg’s The Cutting Room (Simon & Schuster: $20; 268 pp.), Cohen reaches Los Angeles only to find his friend, Der Bruder, dead, though Cohen never accepts the official verdict of suicide. Der Bruder has been finishing a big, controversial and autobiographical film about the Holocaust and some vigilante Nazi-killing he, Cohen and some others did at the end of the war.

Rosenberg, who lives in Tel Aviv, catches Hollywood accurately--at least the Hollywood of yesterday or the day before, brassy gossip columnist and all. At its heart, however, it is an affecting evocation of a tragic past that will not stay in the past.

Andrew Greeley’s latest novel, Fall From Grace (Putnam’s: $22.95; 378 pp.) is also about churchly matters, promoted as dealing with the number of Catholic priests lately revealed as pedophiles, victimizing young boys primarily. The disappointment is that despite the billing, pedophilia is little more than a subplot, almost an offstage issue. The principal plot involves a woman whose politically ambitious husband is a bisexual and a wife-beater. To be sure, Greeley writes angrily about the conspiracy of official silence that surrounds the pedophilia cases. (The pedophile priest in the novel is allowed to keep his parish on the grounds that he does not molest Catholic boys.)

The anger at the cover-up is well-placed. In an afternote, Greeley writes that as “a happy surprise,” some of the remedial measures he advocates in the novel have been adopted by the Chicago archdiocese where novel takes place.

But the chance to look fictionally into the consequences for pedophile victims and indeed at the inner turmoil of the pedophile priest’s fall from grace has been sacrificed to the husband-wife problems, which seem far less interesting and topical.