CRIMINAL PURSUITS

A few years ago the waters of the Chicago River broke through ancient retaining walls and flooded long-unused tunnels deep beneath the Loop, disrupting utilities, creating chaos and paralyzing mid-town for days. Sara Paretsky has used the event as the center of her latest V. I. Warshawski novel, TUNNEL VISION (Delacorte: $21.95; 432 pp.).

In a series of such uniformly high quality it’s hard to make comparisons, but I think the new book is one of Paretsky’s very best. She writes as always with impassioned anger at corruption, most especially as it involves the exploitation and abuse of the weak by the strong. And, also as always, Vic (for Victoria) Warshawski is relentless, headstrong, much abused in body and spirit, risking much and suffering much but seeing as best she can that justice is done.

The plot this time involves a complicated money-laundering scheme that hinges on scams involving efforts to help the homeless. The corruption infects almost everyone in sight who has power, from the Senate down to the precincts. It is a story of nonstop immediacy and action, peopled with vivid and often tragically affecting characters and reaching an end whose satisfactions are to be measured against the casualties, including a romance ruptured. Paretsky remains unique among the women writing about women.

Discovering new voices is always a particular pleasure in crime fiction, and Mark Stern, a lawyer in the Justice Department in Washington, is an unusually commanding new voice. His INADMISSIBLE (Carroll & Graf: $19.95; 215 pp.) looks into the world of capitol politics and a high-powered law firm. Stern writes with authority, economy, pace and fresh invention.

His Peter Fallon is a young lawyer in a firm dominated by an irascible figure legendary for his skill at snatching acquittals from seemingly unavoidable convictions. With his mentor’s help and some surprising late evidence, Fallon gets a senator acquitted on sexual harassment charges.

Then the mentor dies. Murdered, we may confidently assume. There is another murder and indications the senator is in fact a monster. Stern’s message is that the lust for power is as corrupting as power itself, and his well-built story is a persuasive case.

Peter Kerr, an Edinburgh-born journalist living in London, writes compellingly about crime and other villainies in postwar--and now post-Cold War--Europe. His DEAD MEAT (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 239 pp.) is a markedly unusual police procedural set in present St. Petersburg. It is narrated by a visiting inspector from Moscow, ostensibly observing how the locals deal with the Mafia but in fact sniffing out signs of police corruption. (Corruption is in the air this month.)

In this instance, the Mafia is not the familiar Italo-American brand but a kind of generic for the racially organized gangs operating in the dismembered Soviet Union. As the (uncorrupted) Mafia expert in St. Petersburg, Yvgeni Grushko, itemizes them, the gangs are “Ukranian, Byelorussian, Georgian, Chechen, Armenian, Tazhak, Azerbaijani, Kazahk.”

His acknowledgments indicate that Kerr did a lot of on-the-spot research, with full cooperation from the police. You can believe it: The portrait of a Russia in painful change is abundantly atmospheric and minutely detailed. (A nice touch: the significance of cigarette packets opened from the bottom so that dirty fingers don’t touch the filters, a sign of a gulag or prison veteran.)

The gang wars and the murder of a crusading journalist carry resonances of Prohibition. Kerr’s procedural reaches well beyond “Gorky Park.”

In such free time he has after his McNeil-Lehrer News Hour chores, Jim Lehrer writes a very amusing series about One-Eyed Mack, the lieutenant-governor of Oklahoma, a keen hand at deciphering crimes only a lieutenant- governor can solve. In FINE LINES (Random House: $20; 200 pp.) someone is bumping off key legislators, and the month’s insistent theme of corruption surfaces again.

But beneath Lehrer’s lightly and engagingly satiric voice (his wife wins the Chocolate Sash award for her merchandising know-how), it is clear that Lehrer is making points about fine lines indeed, as between right and wrong, good and evil, the uses and misuses of power--and the perennial question about means justifying ends. Which means, what ends? A thoughtful work, and deceptively casual, you could rightly say.

David Ignatius, a Washington Post editor with considerable time and experience abroad, writes international espionage and high finance thrillers, of which his new one, THE BANK OF FEAR (Morrow: $20; 349 pp.) is a sizzling instance, the last of a trilogy (“Siro,” “Agents of Innocence”) about the U.S. involvement in the Middle East over the last quarter-century.

Sam Hoffman, the son of an old-time CIA man in the area, is a financial investigator in London, asked by a terrified Filipino to look into the murder of his wife. Both worked for a mysterious Arab businessman who controls billions in assets presumably belonging to the Ruler (no other identification) of Iraq.

Ignatius’s confident familiarity with spy-craft, the territory and the high-level use of computers to move money around (and hide it) is very impressive. Hoffman and, more particularly, an Arab woman he befriends in the mysterious bank, open a can of worms that are the size and lethality of cobras. There are grisly scenes of torture not for the queasy. In the end it is not clear whether the book is Hoffman’s or Lina Alwan’s, only that it is engrossing all the way. And if the goings-on seem occasionally preposterous, so does Middle East history.

Margaret Maron’s “Bootlegger’s Daughter,” which introduced Judge Deborah Knott, won all the major mystery awards its year. SHOOTING AT LOONS (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 229 pp.) is the third in the series. The judge, on temporary assignment to a court in coastal North Carolina, hopes to get in a little beach time. But there is a murdered fisherman, seething rivalries between developers and the old-timers and a pervading sense that there’s more trouble to come.

As in the earlier books, Maron evokes environments with great detail and sensitive insight. The scale may be intimate, but it is not superficial, and the reader gets to know the town and its social gradations very well. The plot is no great puzzle, but the milieu and the characters are what matter.

The latest of Simon Brett’s novels about near-alcoholic English actor Charles Paris, A RECONSTRUCTED CORPSE (Scribner’s: $29; 189 pp.) is so fraught with a mix of melancholy and angry satire that you have the feeling the series has reached a crossroads. Paris is playing a corpse (or a man about to be a corpse) in enactments for a true-crime television series. The series’ snarlingly cynical host-creator and the ambience of the show allow Brett to depict and savage the medium at its most exploitative.

But dear Charles, unquenchably athirst for Bell’s Scotch, seems hardly a footfall away from Skid Row. His agent despises him, his estranged wife is more impatient with him than ever. Even the nasty reviews of his work he is always quoting seem this time more hurtful than amusing.

Charles solves a pair of murders and the plot is intricate if not baffling. But he does seem ready for a change. Perhaps he should be cast in “The Mousetrap” and live happily ever after.

Crime fictioneers as various as John D. MacDonald and Rochelle Majer Krich began in paperbacks before making the leap to hardcover. Another candidate is Leonard S. Goldberg, a Los Angeles physician who writes medical thrillers. His new one, A DEADLY PRACTICE (Signet softcover: $4.99, 320 pp.) pits Goldberg’s doctor heroine, Joanna Blalock, against the perp of some uniquely ghastly murders of medical personnel at the fictitious Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles.

Goldberg keeps Dr. Blalock in jeopardy and the culprit almost too well-concealed, but the sense of events happening in a real institution matches the work of other, longer-established doctors who write. The sights, sounds, smells and routines of a great hospital become a character in the story.

Anyone interested in philosophical musings about crime-writing are directed to Nicolas Freeling’s CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS (Godine: $22.95, 155 pp.) a slim but potent collection of essays by one of the masters of the craft. “Nearly all good writers are ‘crime-writers,’ ” Freeling says, “for this is the area where those deep-hidden movements of the heart are seen naked.”

He makes the case in quite densely compact essays on Georges Simenon, Dorothy L. Sayers, Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Stendhal, Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler. The judgments are sometimes tough and provocative, and he laments the decline of Chandler after only four notable books. Yet Chandler reinvented what Freeling calls the “krimi:” “the tale of sudden, unexplained violence and the smell of fear.”

What he demolishes with scorn is the notion that crime-writing is a sort of sub-genre, somehow not to be taken as seriously as other fiction. There may better or less good writing, Freeling is saying, but “the nature of crime is also the nature of art.”