CRIMINAL PURSUITS

There’s nothing like starting the month with the discovery of a fine new voice. It belongs to April Smith, whose North of Montana (Knopf: $23, 293 pp.) introduces not only a new author but also a likable new heroine, an unhackneyed view of Los Angeles (the Montana is Montana Avenue in Santa Monica) and a story that majors in the not-quite-predictable.

Smith, a Los Angeles writer-producer from television (“Cagney and Lacey” and four TV movies) knows just about all there is to know about pace, the detailing that generates atmosphere, and the sensitive observation (or imagination) that creates character.

Ana Grey is a part-Latino, almost-30 FBI agent, tough and plain-spoken, very nearly but not wholly monastic in her fierce ambition to get ahead, far ahead, in the local bureau. She nabs a bank robber single-handedly early on and is carpeted by her sexist boss for not calling for help. Nice guy.

She’s assigned to a case involving an aging sex star (a Liz Taylor clone) who is accusing a doctor of turning her on to drugs. The case has curious links to the drive-by killing of a Salvadoran woman who may be a cousin Grey didn’t know she had and whose surviving small children become her responsibility. The dead woman was a maid fired by the doctor’s wife.

The author’s voice is her own, but she recalls Raymond Chandler (and more recent chroniclers) in her ability to evoke the city, from the decadent splendors of Malibu to the despairs of MacArthur Park in the hours before dawn. It is clear she has rubbed egos with temperamental and unlovable stars, but then again all her characters, large and small, spring to life.

The plot, while intricate, has a sad and logical inevitability. The emotionally complicated Ana, burdened by a tragic past, will be fascinating to meet again.

Donald E. Westlake’s Baby, Would I Lie? (Mysterious Press: $19.95, 304 pp.) is a deliciously nutty sequel to his exploration of a Florida-based supermarket tabloid, “Trust Me on This.” (Westlake was once assigned to write a documentary about the best-known of the scandal sheets; the documentary was in the end not filmed, but the research has been a treasure-trove for him.)

The setting is that unlikely rural show-biz capital, Branson, Mo. (the book’s subtitle is “A Romance of the Ozarks”), where a country star is going on trial for murder. Sara Joslyn, who fled the Weekly Galaxy for Trend, a thoughtful and up-market New York magazine, is on hand to give the event the Dominick Dunne treatment.

A seamy crowd from her alma mater, the Galaxy, is on hand as well, buying witnesses and planting bugs right and left, wooing a prosecuting attorney by pretending to represent the Economist, leaving no dirty trick untried. The present journalistic feeding frenzy surrounding the Simpson case is a novelist’s dream of perfect timing.

The singer’s big hit (Westlake supplies several brilliant lyrics) is “If It Ain’t Fried, It Ain’t Food” and I can’t imagine why nobody else got there first. Another of his hits is “Baby, Would I Lie?” The book of the same name is the funniest mystery of the year.

In The Body Farm (Scribners: $23; 387 pp.), Patricia Cornwell extends the adventures of Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Richmond’s medical examiner, currently on detached service to lend the FBI some forensic know-how. A child in a remote North Carolina hill town has been brutally murdered, possibly by a serial killer named Gault, who narrowly eluded Scarpetta once before.

No one can accuse Cornwell of skimping on illustrative detail. This is probably the grisliest of the five Scarpetta novels, including an exhumation. The farm of the title is the University of Tennessee’s Decay Research Facility, which works on cadavers to yield ways of determining times of death with ever-greater accuracy--an important crime-solving tool.

More than putrefaction is afoot, however. The murder is not quite as it seems; Scarpetta’s old cop pal Marino is an emotional mess, and Scarpetta’s difficult niece Lucy is working computers at the FBI’s Quantico center, where Scarpetta, like Cornwell, spends a lot of time. Lucy, seduced and betrayed by another woman, provides a peculiarly affecting subplot to the search for the child-killer.

Lucy’s woes suggest that Cornwell is airing some of her own feelings about the difficulties of being a strong woman in a man’s world. Her few lovers, Scarpetta muses, had been formidable but sensitive men, who could accept that “I was the body and sensibilities of a woman with the power and drive of a man.” None of the new breed of women sleuths have said it more succinctly.

The new book is not least an anthem to the FBI, which Cornwell indicates has come a far piece from J. Edgar Hoover. For all its gamy images, Cornwell again makes forensics engrossing if occasionally bewildering. “If she drowned,” Scarpetta says crisply, “there should be edema fluid in the alveolar spaces with disproportionate autolytic change of the respiratory epithelium.” The same thought occurred to me.

But at last the piling up of microscopic facts, and the Holmesian deductions they trigger, help build uncommon suspense and tension. Cornwell knows her stuff, alveolar spaces but the soul as well, and how to make a story. The ending leaves a mystery solved, but threads remain that will lead to another novel, I’m sure.

Wild Horses (Putnam: $22.95; 319 pp.) is by my count the 33rd Dick Francis novel. Amazingly, after so long a run, Francis has produced one of his best in recent years.

His protagonist this time is a filmmaker, and Francis captures his milieu with the assurance of a man who has spent a lot of time on the set. The cast rings true, from the wizard cinematographer to the writer whining that his script has been eviscerated and the producer trying to placate the writer, the locals and the brass back in Hollywood.

Inevitably, since we are in Francis country, the English director used to be a jockey until he grew too large even for steeplechasing, and got into film as a wrangler on an American location. Now he’s back in Newmarket, filming a drama based on a best-selling novel, which was a thinly disguised retelling of a famous unsolved death, the suspicious suicide of a prominent trainer’s wife a few years earlier.

Past and present collide during the filming, of course, and the director gets to jump a few fences (exciting as always), to escape attempts on his life and generally uphold the Francis tradition of high action in credible settings.

I called Rebecca Rothenberg’s debut novel “The Bulrush Murders” one of the 10 best novels of 1992. Her heroine, Claire Sharples, a government botanist working among the agribusinesses in the San Joaquin Valley, is back in The Dandelion Murders (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 304 pp.).

Once again, the unusual nature of the work and the evocation of the valley and its people are the strengths of an offbeat novel. The mystery this time centers on the unexplainable drownings, in irrigation ditches, of two (possibly more) farm workers and a free-lance journalist.

Pesticide poisonings? Could be, but there’s more, and Claire is quickly into it and into danger. She’s also hung up in a love affair with a co-worker who can’t quite get over his ex-wife and children and is whipsawed between the women. The pesticides are more interesting, which is to say a good book works away from its own virtues.

Dianne G. Pugh’s “Cold Call” was also an exemplary debut novel a couple of years ago. It introduced Iris Thorne, a Los Angeles investment counselor (as the author is). Thorne is back again in Slow Squeeze (Pocket Books: $20; 312 pp.), confronting a hyper-zaftig and florid Southern lady with oodles of money to invest. The unveiling of Barbie Stringfellow is a superior piece of storytelling. Paralleling it is a portrait of a young Chicano in the office who is certain his heritage is against him but who is determined to make it anyway.

Thorne is the target this time, possibly because of the half-million she has in a safe-deposit box, left over from “Cold Call.” Pugh has a raucous sense of humor, a satiric eye and an assured way with construction.

H.R.F. (Harry) Keating wrote the first several of his mysteries starring Inspector Ghote of the Bombay police before he’d actually ever been to Bombay, relying heavily on information from the India Tourist Office (and getting caught out only once, on a minor matter of a train schedule). Ghote makes his 20th appearance in Cheating Death (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 176 pp.).

A student appears to have attempted suicide after stealing an exam paper and selling it to those due to take the exam. But appearances are deceiving (else the whole mystery field would turn to dust overnight), and attempted murder is more like it.

Ghote adrift amid the posturings and pretensions and sly ambitions of academe lets himself appear even more foolish than usual. But he deals shrewdly with rebellious students who imagine they can outwit him, and (not quite as quickly as the reader) untangles the mystery.