Mysteries Galore : THE CLINIC.<i>...

What makes a mystery a runaway bestseller as opposed to a cult favorite? While there’s no accounting for public taste (witness the alarming success of “The Rules” by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider), in reading The Clinic, Jonathan Kellerman’s 11th Alex Delaware book, certain elements emerged as basic requirements. As any Realtor knows, location is critical, and after last year’s disappointing “The Web,” set on a tropical island far too reminiscent of Dr. Moreau’s, Kellerman has returned to his home turf: Los Angeles, a city he clearly loves, warts and all, and describes better than any author since Raymond Chandler. “The stretch of Olympic that housed the Women’s Health Center was one of those clumsy L.A. mixes: factories, junkyards, storage barns, a trendy prep school pretending it was somewhere else by erecting a border of potted ficus.” Not only is Los Angeles already familiar to a wide audience, nothing is too bizarre for this town.

Also vital for widespread appeal is an engaging, eccentric hero that a reader can fantasize about either being or sleeping with. The brainy Delaware, a psychologist-sleuth who lives in a secluded canyon with his guitar-maker girlfriend, Robin, and their French bulldog, Spike, fits the bill. I imagine him to be a cross between Alec Baldwin and George Clooney, though Kellerman is stingy about providing a description or much background information. He takes for granted that you’ve already read his other books and know that Delaware is independently wealthy (what sleuth isn’t?) and that Robin, who has been demoted to a walk-on role much like Dennis Franz’s wife on “NYPD Blue,” actually has personality. Delaware also comes equipped with the de rigueur colorful sidekick, Milo Sturgis, who is, in Kellerman’s universe, the “only openly gay” detective in the LAPD, and a distinctive automobile (a Cadillac Seville).

But perhaps the bottom line is an ability to create an action-packed plot out of a high-concept idea, and it’s here Kellerman earns his royalties. In this book, Hope Devane, a university psychologist who catapulted to fame with her self-help book “Wolves and Sheep: Why Men Inevitably Hurt Women and What Women Can Do to Avoid It,” has been strangely and, of course, brutally murdered. The case is 3 months old and the trail stone cold when Milo turns to Delaware for help.

Kellerman hits more hot-button emotional issues than a month’s worth of “The Oprah Winfrey Show”: sexual harassment, abortion, animal rights, troubled teenagers, organ transplants, pornography, rape, wife abuse, child abuse, kinky sex, even maniacal talk-show guests. The author’s only weakness is his penchant for over-the-top villains that remind me of someone Batman might encounter. Then again, how many zillion dollars have the “Batman” movies grossed?

By contrast, the equally compelling The Ragman’s Memory is a subtler pleasure. Archer Mayor whisks the reader away to the old New England town of Brattleboro, Vt., and while he lovingly and vividly evokes the red-brick buildings, the snow-covered wood piles, even the bridge over the Whetstone Brook, this glitz-free, pine-scented town may not be a destination to which hordes of readers wish to go. A great pity, because the steadfast Lt. Joe Gunther is a bloodhound of unusual depth and insight.

A young girl, Norah Fletcher, brings him a chickadee’s nest. He asks her what is wrong with it and she insists that he look at it before she tells him. Gunther notes, “I was impressed, both at her poise and her unusually mature strategy. Still, yielding to a cop’s instinct to control, I prolonged Norah Fletcher’s anticipation. . . .” He soon realizes the nest is woven with a long tuft of human hair “bound at its base by a small, withered, leathery patch of scalp.” Other parts of the victim are ingeniously found and even more ingeniously identified.

The plot builds slowly but surely, like a Bach Invention, as one by one the inhabitants of Brattleboro are revealed to be hiding something under their parkas and an implausible number of citizens meet misfortune. Still, even the most minor characters ring true, and the author offers tantalizing hints about the history of the characters’ interrelationships, which made me eager to read his previous books. The dramatic conclusion feels light-years away from the beginning, but rather than coming out of nowhere, it felt like the end of a long journey through the bare, branched woods. Highly logical and oddly moving, “The Ragman’s Memory” is, one hopes, a sleeper.

Strangers Among Us, by Edgar Award winner Laurali R. Wright, seems destined for the literary equivalent of the art-house movie theater, even though it’s hard to imagine a more exotic setting than the perpetually foggy town of Sechelt on Vancouver’s Sunshine Coast. Staff Sgt. Karl Alberg of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is appealing if you have a tortured soul or a weakness for intense, brooding men. Even the precipitant action is au courant: teenager Eliot slaughters his parents with a machete. What made him do it? Was he abused? The kid’s not talking, and the author isn’t generous with explanations, but savvy readers may wonder: Has any child in a book published in the last two years had a happy childhood?

The book is longer on haunting flashbacks than on action. Even when Eliot escapes from a detention home with a younger boy, Alberg doesn’t have much of a crime to solve. This leaves our depressive hero with too much free time to fret about his upcoming wedding to his girlfriend, Cassandra, and to wonder why Jack, a malicious stranger from his past, is following him.

The author’s characterizations are meticulous and her prose is surgically precise: “He saw the kid’s shoulder blades beneath the sweatshirt, sharp like chicken wings, and wanted to tell him to straighten up.” Lightening up wouldn’t hurt either.

My vote for the mystery most likely to be heavily discounted at the superstores goes to Carolyn Hart’s breezy Death in Lovers’ Lane. Her sixtysomething--but certainly not old-maidish--heroine, Henrie O’Collins, teaches investigative journalism at a picturesque college in Missouri. When one of her students is murdered trying to uncover information about three old unsolved university crimes, Henrie O takes over.

The author is masterful at re-creating the claustrophobic, strangely political atmosphere of a college town, and Henrie O is shrewd and likable. But if she keeps solving three unrelated crimes per book, her next adventure could be “Death In the Nursing Home.”