Mysteries

In “Catfish Cafe” (Ballantine, 312 pages, $22), case No. 11 for private eye Thomas Black of Seattle, novelist Earl Emerson departs from his usual mixture of hard-boiled detection and witty repartee for a somewhat less larky study of a troubled African American family.

The daughter of Black’s former police partner Luther Little has gone missing, leaving the bullet-ridden corpse of a young white man in the back seat of her wrecked car. Black immediately zeros in on the girl’s family, a unit complicated and made dysfunctional by, among other things, a history of illegitimacy. The missing Balinda resided with her mother, whom Luther never married; her grandmother; her little daughter, Toylee; and two half-brothers, one the paraplegic victim of a drive-by shooting, the other an incipient gangsta. None of them is overly fond of whites in general or Black in particular.

The resourceful sleuth gradually divines that the murder and Balinda’s disappearance may have roots in a decades-old incident in the neighborhood tavern that gives the book its title. But is the Catfish a red herring? Part social study, part whodunit, the elegantly written “Catfish Cafe” does well by both.

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While most suspense novelists are happy to concoct their yarns around one buzz-worthy issue (sex and/or murder in the White House, for instance) Tess Gerritsen has stocked her new medical thriller “Bloodstream” (Pocket, 324 pages, $23) with an assortment of hot-button topics. Widowed Dr. Claire Elliott and her teenage son have traded in the brutal big city for a seemingly ideal resort town in Maine, never once considering that Maine is Stephen King Country. Claire’s initial problem is getting the conservative townspeople used to a woman internist (hot-button No. 1: gender prejudice). Soon to follow are schoolboy murders, a new, possibly untreatable virus and, finally, a smarmy collusion between industry and the government.

Gerritsen, whose previous novels “Harvest” and “Life Support” have raised her to bestseller status, knows how to fashion credible, dimensional characters. A former internist, she can dole out medical mumbo jumbo in terms both accessible and acceptable. And her descriptions of horror and terror (including her heroine’s reaction to a huge worm crawling out her ailing son’s nostril) are riveting, to say the least.

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The prolific crime novelist Max Allan Collins has noted that as fond as he is of the works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and especially Mickey Spillane (with whom he has co-edited several anthologies), he feels uncomfortable writing about a heroic private eye in this morally ambiguous era. So, in 1983, with his novel “True Detective,” he created Nate Heller, a Chicago gumshoe based in the less complex 1930s, who rubs padded shoulders with such real-life characters as Frank Nitti, Eliot Ness, FDR and Ronald Reagan (during his sportscaster days).

Since then, Heller has time-hopped and name-dropped through numerous adventures. Meticulously researched, these period-perfect mixtures of fiction and known fact usually come with Heller/Collins’ speculative but well-informed solutions to mysteries lost to history. Who killed Huey Long? Who really kidnapped the Lindbergh baby?

In “Flying Blind” (Dutton, 344 pages, $24.95), an aging Heller is lured from his retirement by a wealthy Texan who wants to discover the secret of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance. Heller had known the aviatrix well, and most of this highly entertaining novel is occupied with his hard-boiled, first-person recollection (possibly enhanced by the passage of time) of that relationship. On the last few pages of the book, Collins lists and describes quite a few nonfiction studies of Earhart that offer a variety of theories on her fate. Readers who delight in snappy dialogue and jet-paced action undoubtedly will prefer his.

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The Times reviews mysteries every other week. Next Sunday: Rochelle O’Gorman Flynn on audio books.