Mysteries

Part of the art of being a successful mystery writer is the ability to create a leading character who remains as compelling in the 20th outing as he or she was in the first. Moreover, a new reader should be able to pick up any book in a series and get enough information about the sleuth to be able to follow the plot without saying, “Huh?”

Amanda Cross does this brilliantly in “The Puzzled Heart” (Ballantine Books, 257 pages). Her 12th Kate Fansler novel opens with the heroine appearing at her best friend Leslie’s front door. Leslie instantly realizes there’s a crisis because Kate never drops in unannounced, considering such behavior uncivilized. Kate, an English professor at a New York university, is behaving strangely because her husband, Reed, a law professor, has been kidnapped. Too flustered to take control of the situation, as is her wont, Kate enlists the services of another friend, Harriet, an elderly detective who has teamed up with Toni, a young, sexy private eye with a mania for stealth.

Of course, the feisty Kate recovers from her uncharacteristic bout of passivity and goes searching for Reed, with the help of Bancroft, a Saint Bernard puppy (just what you need in New York, a gigantic dog). The plot is unpredictable, in part because it’s a tad unbelievable. Not that it matters. What makes this book a delight is the literate dialogue with characters quoting everyone from Marmee in “Little Women” to Wendy Steiner’s “The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism.”

In the page-turner “Eyes” (Villard, 344 pages), author Joseph Glass introduces a new heroine, Susan Shader, a beautiful young Chicago psychiatrist and criminal profiler who also happens to be clairvoyant. (Talk about a woman having everything.)

As a child, Shader predicted the Watergate scandal and the murder of John Lennon, and so it is not surprising that when the local police need a psychic edge to catch the Coed Killer, a serial murderer who strangles female athletes and gouges out their eyes, they turn to Dr. Shader for help.

Shader’s sidekick, Det. David Gold, is that rarity in crime fiction, an idealistic cop.

Gold is almost superhumanly patient with Susan, who receives her extrasensory information in a somewhat irritating piecemeal fashion. Standing in a victim’s bedroom, she receives the cryptic message “Sleepy . . . Grumpy . . . Bashful, which dwarf are you today?” but can’t make heads or tails of it for a couple of hundred pages.

Still, Susan, who can divine the combinations on locks and sense when a signature is forged, gives Gold enough insight to make an arrest. The city relaxes, but unforeseen by Susan, another murder takes place, and supposedly only she can get into the mind of the real killer. The suspenseful plot fits together like an intricately knitted sweater, and while Susan is a bit too good to be true (I found it difficult to believe that she was so devoted to crime fighting that she gave up custody of her beloved son), I looked forward to learning more about her in the next book.

Five pages into Simon Brett’s hilarious “Mrs. Pargeter’s Plot” (Scribner’s, 249 pages), I made a mental note to pick up the previous four books in the series. In this outing, Mrs. Pargeter, the indomitable violet-eyed widow of a well-connected British criminal, decides to build her dream house, using her late husband’s longtime associate, the shady contractor Concrete Jacket.

The trouble with most builders is they’re always away doing other jobs, Mrs. Pargeter notes. With the often-arrested Concrete, though, “he was always being put away after doing other jobs.” Concrete is showing Mrs. Pargeter her new wine cellar (“Your husband always used to say every house should have places where you can hide stuff”) when they discover a body in the foundation.

The police promptly arrest Concrete, who refuses to talk even though he’s being framed. Eager to resume construction, Mrs. Pargeter sets out to clear his name and enlists the help of an endearing cast of Damon Runyon-esque colleagues.

If you’re looking for a lighthearted, well-plotted British mystery, with eccentric characters, snappy dialogue and sharp observations, you can’t do better than this.

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