CRIMINAL PURSUITS

Manuel Ramos is a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society in Denver. His first novel, The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz, won the 1991 Chicano/Latino Literary Contest at UC Irvine. It has now been published (St. Martin’s Press: $17.95; 201 pp.) and it is a very impressive debut.

Ramos’ protagonist, Luis Mendez, is also a Denver lawyer, with a terminally ill private practice, troubles with the Bar Assn. and a weakness for strong drink. The burnt-out case struggling back to life is a familiar figure in crime fiction, but what gives Ramos’ book fresh interest is Mendez’s past as a Chicano campus activist from the 1970s.

He and some pals called themselves the Red Berets; then one of them, the Rocky Ruiz of the title, was gunned down, evidently by some hooded bigots. Now, 20 years later, somebody has begun knocking off the survivors, after giving them warning phone calls.

As usual, Mendez has to explore both the Denver present, where all the survivors live, and their pasts. There are clues in Brownsville, Tex., a visit nicely described. Back in Denver, Mendez finds his office trashed by an unknown party or parties also in search of clues.

The denouement is surprising, particularly in its reassessment of Ruiz’s death, and the truth has a lot to say about the political climate of the ‘70s. The real power of the book lies in Ramos’s unblinking account of a Chicano professional trying to survive--along with a handful of clients also trying to survive--in an Anglo-dominated society that has not yet abandoned its prejudices or its fears.

Martha Grimes has reportedly been at odds with Elizabeth George over who got there first, presumably as Yanks writing novels set in Britain with aristocrats as sleuths. It seems an unnecessary discontent. Dorothy Sayers’ Peter Wimsey was a lord and so, too, although he kept it quiet, was Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion (in one book he is even whispered to be an heir to the throne). Both were years ahead of Grimes’ Richard Jury and George’s Thomas Lynley, although the earlier authors were undeniably English.

In the genre, sleuths and sidekicks are dime a dozen, or a shilling the dozen. Style and plotting are everything, and the styles of the two Americans are at once disparate and top-rate. George’s work has a Victorian mahoghany solidity, short on humor; Grimes is lighter of foot, often very amusing although also touchingly romantic as required, and she has an incomparable gift for drawing children who are prematurely wise, skeptical and endearing.

For whatever reason, Grimes has gone American this time, in The Horse You Rode In On (Alfred A. Knopf: $21; 332 pp.). She imports Jury and his title-rejecting but nevertheless aristocratic sidekick Melville Plant to Baltimore, where several murders seem related to the discovery (or the forging) of an Edgar Allan Poe manuscript.

A prototypal cabby gives Plant everything he needs to know about Baltimore, including a resume of the films of Barry Levinson. Grimes, who lives in Washington, catches Baltimore very well and as usual creates vivid supporting characters, including another enchanting girl-child, and for good measure invents a sizable hunk of the Poe story.

The new book is not the best of Grimes’ work, but it is customarily ingratiating and pleasingly unpredictable.

Montezuma’s Man (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 277 pp.) is the fifth installment of Jerome Charyn’s outrageous but immensely readable chronicle of Isaac Sidel, the police commissioner of a New York in which everybody’s worst dreams have become reality and in which there are no longer the corrupt and the incorrupt but only varying degrees of corruption, the Commish himself having notches in his belt for actual and attempted murders.

This time Sidel is being pushed to run for mayor, the better to represent the interests of one side of the underworld battle for control of the city. Sidel (said to be appearing shortly as a television character) is not entirely bad; nor is Joe Barbarossa, a very distant descendant of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce and the policeman now assigned as Sidel’s chauffeur.

It suggests the madness of the proceedings to report that Sidel and Barbarossa don stocking masks and knock over illegal joints to annoy one or another of the really bad guys. But Charyn defies synopsis and makes Richard Condon’s inventions seem positively benign. For all the antic goings-on and the preposterous humor, Charyn also invites suspense as to how long he can sustain so malevolent a charade.

Kate Coscarelli, whose five previous novels have been best-selling, well-observed romantic dramas, turns to the mystery-suspense form with Heir Apparent (St. Martin’s Press: $21.95; 310 pp.). It is no mean praise to say that she hits Mary Higgins Clark terrain the first time out.

An irascible millionaire, who has run a small chain of restaurants into a megabucks food conglomerate, dies and leaves his empire, not to the daughter who has been running it expertly, but to the wastrel son who never wanted anything to do with it--but who is, after all, a son. (This is a distinctly feminist novel, not least in Coscarelli’s sympathetic portrait of a woman ably balancing a careerist’s tough-mindedness with a mother’s enveloping warmth.)

Wastrel son is wasted as he lies in drugged sleep hours after the reading of the will. Daughter is the inevitable chief suspect, except that there are more murders, more suspects and a last-page confrontation that settles everything. The villains are not totally concealed but the plotting is intricate and the suspense real enough.

Another debut novel is Sharan Newman’s Death Comes as an Epiphany (TOR Books: $19.95; 321 pp.). Newman, a medieval history scholar at UC Santa Barbara, whisks us back to the France of Heloise and Abelard, the tragic 12th-Century lovers who now lie buried in a common grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. After their secret marriage was discovered and forcibly annulled, they took religious vows, and it is at this point we find them in Newman’s imaginative novel.

A manuscript, crudely altered to indict the now separated lovers as Satanists, turns up at the convent Heloise now runs. Newman’s heroine, a well-born novice, is entrusted to sneak it to Abelard in Paris for his advice.

Murders ensue, jewel thefts and corrupted priests are revealed and pacts with Satan disclosed. Newman wears her scholarship a bit more heavily than Ellis Peters of the Brother Cadfael novels--Latin abounds here--but she tells a brisk and eventful story and it’s a very commendable start.

Nan Robinson is a kind of parole officer for naughty lawyers, working for the California Bar Assn. in Taffy Cannon’s A Pocketful of Karma (Carroll & Graf: $19.95; 256 pp.). A former associate is missing and then found dead, and Robinson’s inquiries lead her to a rich but bizarre California estate where people feel better after they’ve been regressed to one or another of their past lives. (Constant headaches? It just may be you were beheaded during the French Revolution.)

There is, as we might well expect, fraud and karma that is not just bad but lethal lurking about the premises. But it’s nothing that Cannon and Robinson can’t handle with swift and amusing competence.

Jeremiah Healy, a law professor in Boston, relates the doings of Boston private eye John Cuddy, a widower who talks to his wife at graveside when the going gets really bad. In Foursome (Pocket Books: $20; 344 pp.), Healy and Cuddy leave Boston for the wilderness of Maine.

Not that it’s always peaceful in the country. Three of a vacationing foursome from Boston are shot down with a crossbow, making the fourth, who was off grocery-shopping, the likeliest suspect. While he’s in jail, collapsing emotionally, Cuddy seeks proof he’s innocent.

On a trip back to Boston Cuddy is attacked by a gang of murderous young women. The attack relates, somehow, to the killings, but mostly suggests the complexity of Healy’s plot, whose outcome is dramatic, startling and as Down East as a pine tree. Healy’s approach is literate and unmannered--refreshing characteristics as the genre goes.

Nancy Pickard’s But I Wouldn’t Want to Die There (Pocket Books: $20; 185 pp.) is a celebration--sort of--of New York and a newcomer’s responses to that curious place. Pickard’s Jenny Cain has left her job running a charitable foundation in a small New England city, so is available when a friend who ran a similar foundation in Manhattan is killed and a temporary replacement is needed.

The core of the book and the delight of it is Jenny’s introduction to New York and its various wonders, including cab drivers who talk too much or too little and won’t take you where you want to go anyway. It is Manhattan in all its terrors and triumphs, charms and gritty despairs. Anyone who remembers what a first visit was like will identify with the book.

Jenny’s late friend’s apartment was in a building full of crazies, and not always friendly ones, either. Pickard’s plotting this time seems looser than usual, the many red herrings presented and withdrawn rather abruptly, and the solution (was it more than a casual street robbery-assault?) more sad than surprising.

Still, Pickard has by this time made Jenny both individual and sympathetic, and her confrontation with the big city carries the shock of recognition.