SEASON’S READINGS : CRIMINAL PURSUITS : Criminal Minds

Jerome Charyn’s Isaac Sidel quartet has a unique place in crime fiction. Although set in the 1980s, it depicts an anarchic, decaying Manhattan that feels far more appropriate to some acrid day after tomorrow, “Blade Runner” in Gotham. In Little Angel Street (Mysterious: $19.95; 274 pp.), Sidel is a few weeks short of his inauguration as the mayor of New York, but to get away from it all he has been living pseudonymously as Geronimo Jones in a shelter for the homeless.

Then corpses, all insinuatingly tagged as Geronimo Jones but otherwise unidentifiable, start showing up at shelters all over town. The corpses prove to be linked to a scheme involving babies imported from Romania for illegal adoptions. But that’s only a minor thread in Charyn’s demented tapestry.

The tone, population and happenings in Charyn’s books are in fact harder to summarize than an almanac, involving as they do universal corruption, misalliances of all kinds, murder, blackmail and real love (usually jinxed). The books have the quality of some fantastic limbo between dream and nightmare, and serve as dark, prophetic parables of societal dissolution. They are also funny, as inventions of a determined incongruity, and perhaps the last incongruity is that Isaac is a touching figure, carrying a sadness for all that has been lost and the shreds of tenderness that have been saved.

The frustrations of people living beneath an airport flight path provide the heartbeat of Jack Trolley’s Balboa Firefly (Carroll & Graf, $19.95, 262 pp.), a multi-stranded, tough and amusing novel set in San Diego.

A psycho and a tycoon (who might as well be a psycho) independently plan to gun down an airliner on its final approach to Lindbergh Field. The psycho wants quiet, the tycoon wants the field relocated so the real estate he’s been buying up beneath the flight path will shoot up in value.

Deciphering the plot (there are several murders along the way) falls to what the author invents as the San Diego PD’s SCUMB squad (Sickos, Crackpots, Underwear & Mad Bombers). (Would I kid?) Sergeant Donahoo is its point man.

Trolley is like a noir voice out of the past, fast-talking, sardonic, heavy on action, short on rumination, generating a good deal of suspense, if of a who-really-cares sort, and very enjoyable to read. The last, mad collision of contending forces is Class A plotting, with a crisp coda in which just desserts are tasted.

William Murray’s chronicles of magician-bettor Shifty Lou Anderson at trackside are always amusing, atmospheric and affectionate in their view of horses and horseplayers. His latest, Now You See Her, Now You Don’t (Holt: $22; 244 pp.) is one of the best.

The her of the title is a gorgeous, elusive person doing public relations for a right-wing presidential candidate who uses a race horse as a symbol of his valiant, underdog candidacy and who thus commands Lou’s curiosity.

A Lou both curious and infatuated is always a sight, and a concern to his friends, who believe that infatuation with horses is enough for any man. This time more than Shifty Lou’s heart is at risk and he ends in the hospital, badly whumped. The lady’s secrets tumble out, as they will, and they are startling. This time Murray has created a character and events that for once overshadow the racetrack lore, and give the book an unusual resonance.

Sam Llewellyn, a deep-sea sailor himself, has been called the Dick Francis of yachting, water being as fecund with villainy as the track. He has written several muscular thrillers, among them “Clawhammer” and “Riptide,” which feature helmsman heroes grappling with both storms and brutish but clever enemies. The violence is abundant, the sea stuff as tangy as saltwater.

Maelstrom (Pocket Books: $20; 402 pp.) is even more ambitiously plotted and written than before. Fred Hope, a fighting environmentalist in the Greenpeace tradition, is now living quietly, running a small coastal hotel in England. His wife is a quadriplegic, a casualty of protest bombing that went wrong and for which Hope took undeserved blame and went to prison for manslaughter.

Now he’s drawn back to sea to help a corrupt and stupid stepbrother involved with a Norwegian neo-Nazi. Llewellyn runs a parallel story, a half- century history of beloved Uncle Ernie, the mentor who was an old lefty, lately murdered and somehow connected to the Norway caper. The plot-lines converge in a very well-managed last page denouement. Before that, there has been one of Llewellyn’s trade-marked shipboard battles, this one in freezing northern waters, with nuclear warheads as the disputed treasure. A first-rate thriller.

Jeff Andrus, a television writer, makes his print debut with Tracer, Inc. (Scribner’s: $20, 249 pp.). John Tracer, a down-on-his-luck, out-of-work husband and father becomes a PI and signs on to, uh, trace a missing Carmel teen-ager, whose disappearance involves some quite unpleasant people.

The jacket describes the book as a mixture of whimsy and darkness, but the twain here seem to have the affinity of oil and water. The plot proceeds largely by dialogue, which leans toward the folksy or, it may be, the whimsical. The prevailing tone is of the sitcom, lighter than air and insufficiently involving.

Andrus is obviously a skilled writer, but the darkness is several hues too light to engage the reader’s interest, and Tracer and family fall short of a cozy zaniness that was evidently sought.

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The Year’s Best Pursuits

Lists of “bests” are as quirky and individual as fingerprints . . . but here are the 10 mysteries “Criminal Pursuits” columnist Charles Champlin admired most this year.

THE CONCRETE BLONDE, by Michael Connolly (Little , Brown) Third in his police procedurals featuring Harry Bosch of the LAPD, this is also a fine courtroom drama with a classic plot, featuring the weighted lady.

DIXIE CITY JAM, by James Lee Burke (Hyperion) One of mystery’s best prose stylists with a fully-realized hero in Dave Robicheaux, Burke here creates particularly nasty villains in pursuit of a German sub.

THE DYING OF THE LIGHT, by Michael Dibdin (Pantheon) Christie-like characters in a ghastly nursing home where the sane plot an imaginary murder as a means of escape. Bizarrely, wonderfully ingenious.

MENACED ASSASSIN, by Joe Gores (Mysterious Press) Often funny (“32 Cadillacs”) Gores turns serious, using a mystery--who wants to bump off a scientist?--to explore science, creationism and the springs of violence.

NORTH OF MONTANA, by April Smith (Alfred A. Knopf) The year’s most promising new voice, Smith introduced a part-Latino FBI agent in Los Angeles in a drug case involving an aging movie queen.

PERFECTLY PURE AND GOOD, by Frances Fyfield (Pantheon) Sarah Fortune, a London lawyer and enchanting free spirit given to nude handsprings on the lawn, confronts a batty family and a clever killer.

SHE WALKS THESE HILLS, by Sharyn McCrumb (Scribner’s) A folk legend, mountain mysticism and several present plot lines (one a manhunt) converge in a masterful, flavorful story set in the Tennessee hollows.

STRAWGIRL, by Abigail Padgett (Mysterious) Second in an excellent series about a social worker fighting manic depression as well as crime, here a child murder with an innocent suspect. Thrilling, angry and compassionate.

TUNNEL VISION, by Sara Paretsky (Delacorte) The author’s unflagging series finds new social concerns and perils for V. I. Warshawsky amid the (real) flooding of Chicago’s Loop when ancient tunnels gave way.

YOU KNOW WHO, by Nicolas Freeling (Mysterious) The most philosophical of mysterians, Freeling offers murder and suspense along with wit and musings on values, as Henri Castang seeks an Irish diplomat’s killer.