CRIMINAL PURSUITS

Even in our acronym-happy age, I’m not sure that anyone but Ross Thomas would have come up with VOMIT (Victims of Military Intelligence Treachery) but so he has, in AH, TREACHERY! (Mysterious Press, $21.95, 274 pp.). It is another in his unique succession of sleek, amusing, imaginative tales of duplicity, corruption, betrayal and other entertainments.

His plots do not respond to easy synopsizing, but it hardly matters. His protagonist this time, Partain, is having a thin life clerking in a gun shop in deepest Wyoming when a visitor drops by with word that an old and unresolved intelligence scandal in Latin-America is resurfacing. It turns out that Partain, then an Army major, had been a fall guy in the affair, the bribing of counterrevolutionary group in which the bribe disappeared. He is presumably still at risk.

There are subsidiary matters: a political fund-raising woman whose unaccountable $1.6 million slush fund has also unaccountably disappeared, and there are murders and discoveries, all largely revealed in Thomas’ patented dialogue, which is urbane, economical and forever a joy to read.

Janet Evanovich is not new to fiction--she has published romances--but she is new to crime fiction and her first offering is a lulu. In ONE FOR THE MONEY (Scribner’s: $20; 290 pp.), Stephanie Plum, just scraping by in Trenton, N.J., blackmails her way into a desperation job as a bounty hunter, chasing down bail-bond skippers for her cousin Vinnie the bondsman.

Her first absentee client is a vice cop charged with murder. By a nice fictional coincidence he’s the smoothie who deflowered her in high school and told all. He’s still an attractive devil, and thoughts of revenge sweeten the attraction of the bounty.

Evanovich, who lived in New Jersey before writing her way to Virginia, is funny and ceaselessly inventive, and describes Trenton to a gritty fare-thee-well. Stephanie keeps finding and losing Joe the cop, steals his car when her own heap conks out, runs afoul of a truly sadistic heavyweight contender (not so funny and indeed very scary), and all the while the evidence grows that Joe was set up and is in hiding to try to prove it.

Stephanie is imperiled almost daily and the finale, when All Comes Clear, manages to be both comic and suspenseful. The telling is first-person, with all the artifices the method requires, but Stephanie’s voice, breezy and undauntable, is all her own despite the ever more crowded field of female PI’s. Her own moral seems to be that when the going gets tough, the tough get funny. It seems no surprise that Hollywood has optioned the book for more bucks than a bounty hunter makes in a decade.

Sarah Dunant is host of a nightly cultural affairs show on BBC2 television in London. In her spare time she writes very good mystery/thrillers, of which FATLANDS: A Hannah Wolfe Mystery (Otto Penzler Books: $21; 215 pp.) is the third, after “Birth Marks” and “Snowstorm in a Hot Climate.”

Her heroine is Hannah Wolfe, a private eye who works for a nice ex-cop named Frank and who upholds the genre tradition by having a rather tenuous love life. In the Sara Paretsky tradition, Dunant’s novel is about something: animal rights. But while the author’s sympathies are clear, the book is neither tract nor a preachment. The viewpoints flow from the events.

Wolfe is hired to pick up a teen-age girl from her boarding school and escort her to London for a day’s shopping before Daddy, a pharmaceutical executive, gathers her up for the theater. The teen-ager is bright and complicated, her brattiness a cover for a hidden agenda. She eludes Wolfe’s overview, turns the ignition in Daddy’s car and is blown to bits. It’s a shocker, because on brief acquaintance the girl had the sympathy of the detective and the reader.

What the girl was up to, what Daddy was up to, what his firm is up to, all make for fascinating revelations. Hannah is brass-knuckled at one moment and just does avoid taking permanent leave during the last seconds of hog-wild frenzy.

Dunant is a fine new name to know if, like me, you hadn’t made her acquaintance before.

Another thriller that is indubitably about something is HALF NELSON (Pocket Books: $20; 279 pp.), the fifth in Jerome Doolittle’s Tom Bethany series about a volunteer wrestling coach at Harvard (thus the titles, others including “Head Lock” and “Body Scissors”) who also investigates.

Doolittle’s targets (forget the balanced view) are the lumber giants who clear-cut the forests with a posterity-be-damned attitude. At the urging of his lady-love at the ACLU in Washington, Bethany tries to protect the soft-spoken but militant leader of an ecological group called Earth Everlasting. Bethany fails but engineers a score-settling that is majestically and perhaps wickedly ingenious. It may not save the forests but it reduces the villain population and is totally satisfying.

Doolittle, who has been a Carter speech writer and once ran a cafe in Vientiane, ranks with Robert Parker, Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain and Ross Thomas as a high voltage story-teller, and that is exalted company.

NO WITNESSES (Hyperion: $22.95; 365 pp.) is Ridley Pearson’s eighth novel, and as before he writes a serious, well-researched, complex thriller, set again in Seattle, where Pearson lives. This one involves the poisoning of food cans on grocery shelves, where they kill the unsuspecting innocent who have randomly chosen their own deaths. It’s an elaborate extortion scheme aimed at the food processor, the ransom being collected at ATMs.

Pearson’s sleuths are a police detective, Lou Boldt, and a psychologist, Daphne Matthews, who discover that the original scam begat successor scams with a Byzantine set of motivations and connections. The suspense is not really pulse-pounding but Pearson does convey the horror of the randomness, and the detailing has its own interest. His principals, violating tradition, are not lovers.

Richard A. Lupoff hosts a radio show in Berkeley and is a veteran, wide-ranging writer whose output includes a biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs. You have the feeling he follows his enthusiasms into fiction. His THE SEPIA SIREN KILLER (St. Martin’s: $20.95; 304 pp.) is at heart a celebration of the world of black filmmaking which, like the black baseball leagues, paralleled the white big-time well into mid-century.

The book is one of a series featuring Lupoff’s interracial couple, Hobart Lindsey, an insurance adjuster, and Marvia Plum, a Berkeley police sergeant.

A fire at the Pacific Film Archive has claimed the life of a young woman researching black films. An ancient black man (modeled, as Lupoff admits in an afterword, on the career of Oscar Micheaux) appears with questions about an ancient insurance policy with Lindsey’s company. He is a filmmaker long presumed dead, but coincidentally his film, “The Werewolf of Harlem,” is being honored, along with its star, in Oakland.

The fire is only the beginning of trouble, and its roots are deep in the past, related to another fire, which killed a film’s star and put the company out of business. The mystery is not mind-boggling but the old man is a great character, Lupoff has an exception ear for dialogue and the blend of fiction and fact gives the novel a special attractiveness.

Talk about thrillers that are about something: Joe Gores’ new book, MENACED ASSASSIN (Mysterious Press: $19.95; 338 pp.), is, as Gores cheerfully admits in a closing note, a novel “that happens to examine man’s origins, his nature, his relationship with the world around him, and the wellsprings of his almost unremitting violence against his own kind.” (The latter would inevitably be of some interest to mystery writers.)

Luckily Gores has come up with a plot substantial enough to carry such heavy musings. The corporate executive wife of a distinguished paleoanthropologist named Dalton is murdered and the scientist himself becomes the target of death threats from a serial killer who signs himself Raptor.

Dalton returns from research in Africa for a major public lecture, which is used as a linking punctuation throughout the book. Dante Stagnaro, a detective on the organized crime beat, is assigned to protect Dalton from Raptor.

The lecture serves as Gores’ opportunity to explore his topics of interest, including Science vs. Creationism and the points at which they seem to coincide. The lecture is engrossing, and in his appendix, Gores lists the titles of 18 books he has consulted and whose thought he has painlessly paraphrased, from Robert Ardrey’s “African Genesis” to Dudley Young’s “Origins of the Sacred.”

The result is a most unusual combination of entertainment and provocation from the author also capable of the hilarious “32 Cadillacs” a couple of years ago.

Ian Rankin is an Edinburgh-based poet, short story writer and winner of a Chandler-Fulbright Fellowship for authors of crime fiction. His police procedurals featuring Edinburgh detective John Rebus are atmospheric, fast-moving and very good. THE BLACK BOOK: A John Rebus Mystery (Otto Penzler Books: $21; 288 pp.) is the fifth in the series.

The black book of the title is a coded diary kept by a young officer still fascinated by a years-ago hotel fire in which a never-identified man died. The officer is ambushed and left in a coma and Rebus takes up the inquiry, hoping to learn what the officer knew that made him a target.

The quest is populated with vivid characters, not least among them a male couple who run a restaurant that is a shrine to Elvis. Crime is evidently as nasty, brutish and organized in Scotland as elsewhere, and some of its beneficiaries equally well-concealed behind respectable fronts. Murder will out, of course, and not a moment too soon.

Reginald Hill is a Brit who deserves to be more widely known here than he is. He is prolific (24 titles to date) but gives no sign the springs of imagination do not flow as generously as ever. He is clever (the chapter headings in the new book are all quotes from Jane Austen, for purposes of irony if no other). His plotting is fiendishly good and his denouement, payoff to a bloody first chapter, is breathtaking in its brazen unexpectedness.

The book, PICTURES OF PERFECTION (Delacorte: $19.95; 307 pp.) takes place in one of those quaintly colorful and dysfunctional villages without which British crime fiction would shrivel and die. The local constable is missing and Hill’s regulars Inspectors Dalziel and Pascoe, augmented by Sergeant Wield, seek to locate him.

They contend with the local gentry, a bookseller of dubious ethics, a Bible-quoting cafe owner, a rather grand arts editor of a regional daily, and a covey of other villagers looking forward to the annual Day of Reckoning when all accounts are settled, as they certainly are.

It is not exactly social realism, but it’s an elegant and diverting piece of writing all the way.

Hear the Authors

To hear these authors reading from their works, call TimesLine at 808-8463 and press 8 and the author’s category number.

Janet Evanovich *7819

Ross Thomas *7811

For a menu of past readings *7810