Offbeat Details Add Interest to Sleuth Story

You’ve got to hand it to David Hunt for coming up with a novel quirk to distinguish his heroine, photographer Kay Farrow, from all the other sleuths working the Bay Area: She’s an achromat, someone who can’t perceive colors, is snow-blinded in sunshine but sees like an owl in the dark. In “Trick of Light” (Putnam, $21.95, 383 pages), her second escapade, Kay’s suspicions are aroused when her mentor, retired photojournalist Maddy Yamada, is hit by a motorcyclist in the middle of the night in San Francisco’s seedy Mission district. The ailing Maddy seldom left her Russian Hill apartment, and why was there a roll of undeveloped film in her camera when Maddy had stopped taking pictures? Processing the film, Kay, a cop’s daughter, recognizes that they are “the kind of pictures a blackmailer might take, or a cop on a stakeout.”

She doggedly locates the spot where the surveillance photos were shot and embarks on a harrowing journey that takes her from the fog-shrouded nether world of the San Francisco piers to the Goddess Gun Club, a terrifying private club near Mendocino. Hunt, the pen name for William Bayer, who won the Edgar for his novel “Peregrine,” conjures up a dusky vision of San Francisco that would give the Chamber of Commerce nightmares but puts Kay’s visual impairment to the most atmospheric use.

“Brilliant San Francisco days, so glorious for others, are painful for me,” Kay notes. “I like the city best when it’s enveloped in fog, swaddled in mystery and mist.” The author is a master of the offbeat detail--be it the practice of randori, the art of dealing with multiple attackers, or the history of erotic etchings on guns--and the stunning denouement left me eager for Kay’s next quest.

*

Set in 1561, at the court of Elizabeth I, Fiona Buckley’s “The Doublet Affair” features Ursula Blanchard, a lady of the Presence Chamber who moonlights as a spy for William Cecil, the queen’s secretary of state. Frankly, I was expecting a few too many “hey nonny nonnies,” but this historical tale of manners and deception is charming and suspenseful. Decked out in satin kirtle and farthingale, Ursula, 26, engages in what she calls her “curious and unwomanly profession” to support her young daughter, and the book opens memorably with Ursula learning how to pick locks. Her acquaintances Ann and Leonard Mason are suspected of being involved in a treasonous plot to overthrow Elizabeth in favor of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. One of the queen’s spies has already been murdered and with trepidation Ursula agrees to go to the Masons’ country home, under the guise of teaching their unruly daughters the fine arts of embroidery and dance.

Given that the plots hatched by Mary Stuart’s supporters rivaled the ones cooked up by the CIA to kill Castro for sheer number and lunacy, the author’s premise is believable, apart from Leonard Mason’s attempt to build a glider. And she cleverly gives period details a human frame of reference--the ruff that itches the neck, the pockmarks left over from “a childhood attack of small pox,” Ursula’s fondness for her “evening posset,” a sleeping draught. The biggest weakness is that the author fails to provide some key background details. For example, Ursula is married to a dashing French Catholic, Matthew de la Roche, whom she abandoned out of loyalty to the queen. “The marriage was forced on me,” Ursula says cryptically but never explains why. I may be forced to buy her earlier book, “To Shield the Queen,” to find out.

*

Janet Dawson’s latest Jeri Howard mystery, “Where the Bodies Are Buried,” is superbly plotted and fast paced yet it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. I’m new to the series and behind the curve on the heroine’s back story but judging from this episode it seems like Jeri, an Oakland-based private investigator, is the most aggressively normal sleuth working today. No eccentric boyfriend, no bizarre eating or exercise habits, not even a funky car, and she gets along swell with her ex-husband, Sid, a cop. (Aren’t they all?)

Jeri is put on retainer by Rob Lawter, a paralegal at Bates Inc., a food processing firm. Lawter has evidence of a corporate cover-up but before he can provide more details, he falls, jumps or is pushed out of a fifth-story window. Before you can say, “Can I borrow a power suit?” Jeri goes undercover as a paralegal secretary and discovers that the company is--surprise!--a paradigm of corporate treachery. The denouement is satisfying but given Jeri’s blandness, I couldn’t get emotionally involved.

Gift tip for mystery buffs: “The Big Book of Noir” (Caroll & Graf, $19.95, 386 pages), edited by Ed Gorman, Lee Server and Martin H. Greenberg. The new trade paperback is filled with articles and essays about such masters as John Houston, Billy Wilder, Ross Macdonald and even Jack Webb.

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