CRIMINAL PURSUITS

How better to greet the return of baseball than with a baseball thriller done with great skill. The obsessed fan is a familiar enough figure in suspense fiction, But in THE FAN (Warner Books: $22.95; 338 pp.) Peter Abrahams gives him a new dimension as well as a different setting. It’s as if David Mamet, Stephen King and the Irwin Shaw of “The 80-Yard Run” had brought off a ghostly collaboration.

Gil Renard is a familiar fictional type in another way--a man whose life is collapsing. He is fired from his job as a salesman for a hard-pushing cutlery firm (we are in Mamet country here). He’s near-broke and the payments on the Beemer are crushing him; he’s estranged from wife and son, and such consolation as he can find in life is remembering the days of his baseball glory (this is Irwin Shaw country). As it happens, his glory was as a pitcher in Little League.

His idol, Bobby Rayburn, a multimillion dollar slugger newly acquired by the local team, has his own problems--a .174 batting slump. The two men’s misfortunes collide head-on, with a terrible, logical inevitability.

Renard, descending fast into a kind of shrewd lunacy, pulls heists in a ski-mask with an old Little League buddy and is soon into murder (new uses for the cutlery) and, quite mad now, imagines he can help old Bobby and the team.

Abrahams has a marvelous feeling for professional baseball as played and lived, and for the peculiarly aching male nostalgia for athletic triumphs long past. A nice, ill-fated cop and a woman researching a magazine profile do such sleuthing as there is, but the story runs itself, the suspense building like a boiler about to blow. Not to be missed if you like the genre. The book has been optioned by the producer of “Forrest Gump.”

At least four promising first novels lurk among the month’s tottering stack of new releases.

A BBC documentarian in London, John Lawton, recreates the London of the Blitz in BLACK OUT (Viking: $22.95; 342 pp.) . The days and nights of the bombings, the gutted streets, the thousands sleeping on Underground platforms, the shortages of everything, the Yanks everywhere, come alive with indeed documentary fidelity.

The story is a kind of mix of police procedural and espionage thriller (finally concluded in Berlin during the 1948 Airlift). Children playing in a vacant lot find a neatly severed arm, ring, sleeve and even a cuff link still in place. Frederick Troy, a homicide sergeant of Russian descent, gets the case. Other body parts are found elsewhere. Both victims were German rocket scientists and a third has gone missing.

Troy’s researches lead him crashing into very high-level stone walls, the Brits running interference for the OSS (a secretive lot, even before it became the CIA), and an Army major apparently involved in all the killings.

Two ladies appear: an English aristocrat with an eye for the major but spare time for Troy, and a WAC from Manhattan who also beds down Troy in Homeric style. However the women fit into the plot (and they certainly do), the sex scenes have the marketing department written all over them.

Troy, out of bed, is kicked nearly to death, almost wiped out when a bomb hits a shelter, is shot and severely wounded and also goes blind for several days. Lawton writes very well and creates a large gallery of well-drawn characters (the males being significantly less fantastical than the women). The ultimate revelations of concealment and double-dealing suggest an homage to LeCarre, not a bad model at all.

Richard Barre (pronounced Barry) is a longtime ad executive making his fiction debut with THE INNOCENTS (Walker: $19.95; 234 pp.) , set in the private-eye heartland, Southern California, and featuring PI Wil Hardesty. Barre’s not inconsiderable achievement is to tell his story with such earnestness that its improbabilities can be forgiven. Well, almost.

A flash flood in the desert uncovers the skeletons of seven murdered children, the only clue an engraved religious medal. Hardesty is hired by a father (who recognizes the medal but can’t go public with the information) to find the killer.

The plot involves a lucrative trade in the illegal adoption of Mexican babies, with ties to a corrupted but still-active priest. Barre has invented a vivid trio of villains and catches the varied Los Angeles scenery very well. He also generates a narrative drive that, as sometimes happens, is stronger than the originating premise, which stretches credulity.

In WILD JUSTICE by Margret Pierce (St. Martin’s: $19.95; 200 pp.) , a woman refuses to accept the police verdict that her pretty daughter died after an accidental fall at her employer’s Georgetown mansion. In hope of discovering the truth, the woman gets herself hired on as a housekeeper at the mansion. It is “Mrs. Doubtfire” with a difference.

The truth about the murder is unpleasant (as the reader knew all along) and the suspense is what the mother can do about it and whether the employer will catch wise to her before justice overtakes him.

As Margot Peters, the author has published biographies of the Barrymores and of the actresses in George Bernard Shaw’s life. Turning to the Mary Higgins Clark genre, she writes a well-detailed ironic thriller that Alfred Hitchcock would, I suspect, have read with pleasure.

John Dunning was until recently a Denver antiquarian book dealer, who in 1992 wrote a wonderful novel about the trade called “Booked to Die.” Its hero was Cliff Janeway, a former Denver cop launching a new career as an bookseller. Now, bless us all, Dunning and Janeway are back, in THE BOOKMAN’S WAKE (Scribner: $21; 351 pp.) .

As before, Dunning’s text is enlivened with fascinating tidbits on first-edition prices (probably already outdated, the author warns in a note) and exotic clues in the printing that make a first edition worth a lot more or a lot less. Some publishers are better than others in identifying true firsts, and not knowing the niceties can leave a bookseller holding a costly dud.

This time, another ex-cop turned private investigator persuades Janeway to turn bounty hunter long enough to fetch back from Seattle a young woman who jumped bail after being charged with the theft of a rare privately printed copy of Poe’s “The Raven.” A nationwide series of murders, spanning several years, are apparently linked to the same edition. How can a dealer resist?

The woman, who calls herself Eleanor Rigby, is a book finder, making a small living by haunting thrift shops for overlooked rarities. But both Janeway and Rigby appear to have been set up by some outstandingly thuggish villains. The rest of the book is an eventful chase around the Northwest, he after her, villains after them both. Nothing bookishly sedentary here.

Liza Cody introduced her lady wrestler, Eva Wylie, in “Bucket Nut” last year. Eva calls herself the London Lassassin, lives in a London junkyard where she is its night watch person, aided by two fierce dogs. She is essentially good-hearted despite a chip on her shoulder the size of Earl’s Court and a tongue like an acetylene torch. The male chauvinism she encounters is near to appalling, but she doesn’t yield an inch.

Cody’s new book, MONKEY WRENCH (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 246 pp.) is as much a slice of her life (and a large angry piece of her mind) as it is a shaped thriller. One of the neighborhood streetwalkers is brutally murdered, evidently by a customer, and the victim’s sister tries to persuade Eva to start a class in self-defense for the surviving hookers.

Eva is a true eccentric, and you can’t move further from the world of vicarages and church fete than to Eva’s sleazy part of town, with its squatter houses, druggies, whores, born losers and occasional survivors. Eva’s monologue is a tour de force of defiant anger, and it finally elicits admiration for her brand of indomitability in a tough world.