With its courtroom fireworks and its plot...

With its courtroom fireworks and its plot twist worthy of (if not to the taste of) Agatha Christie herself, Scott Turow’s “Presumed Innocent” introduced a rare new talent, who launched (or so it came to seem) a whole new generation of lawyers writing dramatically about the law. His second, “The Burden of Proof,” less pyrotechnic than the first, confirmed that Turow was at least as interested in probing character as in devising plots.

His new novel is Pleading Guilty (Farrar, Straus, Giroux: $24; 386 pp.), has been eagerly awaited but, earnest and thoughtful as it is, is somberly disappointing. Although fully peopled with lawyers, the story hardly peeps into a courtroom. The plot, intricate as always, involves $5.6 million purloined within a law firm which, in its internal machinations, is likely to confirm everyone’s darkest suspicions about the profession. (A declaimer by Turow insists it bears no resemblance to his Chicago firm.)

The narrator, spilling his tale in a very long series of tape recordings (a cumbersome and here quite unconvincing telling method), is Mack Malloy, sometime cop (bent), longtime drunk now dry but with the occasional lapse who has become a lawyer-investigator with the said dubious firm.

One of the attorneys, a pal of Mack’s, has gone missing, evidently with the loot in hand. A bookie’s corpse appears and disappears in the missing man’s refrigerator, hinting of even fouler play. The firm itself would prefer to cover up everything, even in lieu of the money, in hope of retaining the conglomerate client whose money, in a sense, it is and whose fees keep the law firm alive.

For all the complexities of plot, it seems clear that Turow’s real interest is in Malloy’s character and in his wrestling with questions of duty, honor, loyalty, self-interest and, of course, guilt and innocence. Malloy’s own guilts cling to his soul like lint from his Catholic upbringing; and there are his memories of a drunken, crooked father, loyal mother, failed marriage and estranged daughter, and overall his suffusing sense that his life is about as screwed and pointless as lives get.

The ending is suitably clad in irony and bitterness. Turow as always can sketch vivid characters--a nasty nemesis of a detective, two women revealed as vulnerable beneath their tough surfaces, the missing pal’s hopeless infatuation with another man and, throughout, lawyers of surpassing opportunism.

To his credit Turow has obviously tried to stretch the form rather than simply repeat his own success. What is sadly curious is that Malloy--in victory, defeat or ongoing anguish--is neither very interesting or very sympathetic, the events not notably suspenseful, the pace sluggish.

If Turow’s third outing is a let-down, Patricia Cornwell’s Cruel & Unusual (Scribner’s: $21; 384 pp.), the fourth in her series about Richmond medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta, is anything but. It is probably the best of the series, sure-handed and adventurous.

In her ingenious story, the fingerprints of an executed murderer are found at a crime scene well after his electrocution. As before, Cornwell, who worked for a time as a computer operator in the medical examiner’s office, brings a pair of autopsies authentically to life, so to speak, for the unflinching reader and makes the investigative powers of the computer marvelously apparent. Forensic medicine plays its part (an eiderdown feather is crucial), although the denouement, as Holmes himself might agree, rests on knowing what the clues signify.

The clues pick up a trail of corruption and concealment that reaches high into the state government, puts a framed Scarpetta in jeopardy before a grand jury, and, like “Silence of the Lambs,” leaves a hint that the end is not yet, although next time the good doctor will be off in a new job. Cornwell has become a first-rate storyteller.

So has Elizabeth George, the onetime English teacher who, living in Orange County, writes as unerringly about England as P. D. James. Her newest, Missing Joseph (Bantam: $21.95; 456 pp.) is, like “A Suitable Vengeance” and her other novels, spacious, eloquent, carefully plotted, rich in atmosphere and delineations of character. Its pacing is deliberate but the events so interesting that the reading is not easily interrupted.

Her detective, Thomas Lynley, this time has hardly more than a walk-on (an occasional phenomenon with series sleuths, going back at least to Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion). His colleague, forensic scientist Simon St. James and his wife Deborah, distraught about her barrenness but reluctant to adopt, go off to Lancashire to seek out a vicar who had had some comforting counsel for her during a chance encounter at the National Gallery.

But the vicar is dead, after eating a poisonous herb cooked by a widow who seemingly should have known better. Like all fictional English villages this one teems with passions, jealousies and tangled pasts, not least the vicar’s own. A constable is too eager to close the case, a village lass loves too well, young lovers are both star-crossed and double-crossed.

All of these currents, rich and redolent in the best Victorian tradition, lead to resolutions at once melancholy and orderly, in a mode that might have fit Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. A fine achievement.

Frances Fyfield, a London attorney working in the Crown Prosecutor’s Office, is writing on home ground and very well, too. In Shadow Play (Pantheon: $18; 208 pp.) her heroine is Helen West, a Crown Prosecutor (which sounds like a position comparable to an assistant DA and not much better paid either).

West has been trying to nail a nasty little chap named Logo for scaring young women. In fact he is a thoroughly demented man obsessively seeking the daughter who sensibly ran away from him, and who might be an unhappily promiscuous clerk in West’s office.

The office, the streets, Logo’s shrewd, crazed perceptions, West’s own states of mind (idealistic and discouraged) and some unusually suspenseful pursuits are swiftly described in Fyfield’s exemplary prose.

David Stout won an Edgar for best first novel for his “Carolina Skeletons” in 1990. His third thriller, The Dog Hermit (Mysterious: $18.95, 311 pp.), set on the Pennsylvania line in western New York state, centers on the kidnaping of a rich man’s small son and the death in a car crash of a reporter sent from a nearby small city daily to cover the case.

The dead reporter is replaced by a desk editor who is out of practice and out of confidence. The local cops are hostile, an FBI agent friendly and sympathetic (rare in fiction these days), the turns of events surprising. The hermit’s back story and the child’s peril make Stout’s book unexpectedly affecting.

Stout, a newspaper desk man, writes as if he never met a publisher he liked, or so some incidental but acidic portraiture along the way suggests.

Robert Crais is one of the sleekest of the latter-day private eye writers. His Elvis Cole, with a wisecrack for every situation and an L.A. office he might have sublet from Philip Marlowe’s estate, is in Free Fall (Bantam: $19.95; 280 pp.) operating in the grand tradition. In Scene 1, he receives the inevitable dishy lady in his office and agrees, for a ludicrously low retainer, to discover why her policeman boyfriend is acting so strange lately.

Funny she should ask: boyfriend and an ugly partner show up immediately after the lady and try to nudge Cole off the case before it has begun. The cops belong to a special five-man anti-drug team, which has gone sour. Cole is all too soon in ghetto gangland, caught between bad guys and bad cops.

Crais makes the point that there are good people in South-Central, too, but in the book the baddies make better copy. Not much innovation at hand here, but what Crais does, he does very well.

Dr. Roger Dunham of Santa Barbara would appear to have done an internship at USC-County General Hospital. In Final Diagnosis (Signet: $4.99; 379 pp., softcover original), he evokes the place so vividly you can all but catch the aromas of disinfectant, floor wax and death. The sense of continuous emergency is practically palpable.

In Dunham’s fast, tough story, two young interns assigned to the jail ward stumble over a vicious scheme in which hospital staffers steal drugs and smuggle them into the jail itself. The scheme is so lucrative it is worth the odd murder to keep it going.

The medical terminology is occasionally very thick, and you are reminded of James Thurber’s Walter Mitty (“It’s coreopsis, and it’s moving in fast”) but Dunham tells his story with such authority (and high drama) that it all helps.

Detective First Grade by Dan Mahoney (St. Martin’s: $21.95; 375 pp.) is a confident first novel by a third generation New York policeman (now a private investigator), whose wife is a policewoman.

Mahoney, himself a detective first grade before he went private, gives a new meaning to the police procedural. Every step of his story is told with such minute detailing that it seems a work of memory as much as invention (and may well have elements of both).

His detective hero, Brian McKenna, has a special eye for potential perpetrators wearing concealed weapons. He spots and chases one suspect and ends up in a shootout, killing him. The dead man is linked to Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, the Peruvian terrorist group. Mahoney’s story is the attempt to track down a terrorist cell planning a Manhattan bombing.

While the reader often wishes an editor had cried, “Get on with it,” the cumulative effect has the verisimilitude of, say, “Day of the Jackal.” And the final mano-a-mano is a stunning piece of theater.