L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

The president of the United States is murdered on camera during a White House news conference, leaving behind a grieving widow with eyes on his succession and a skein of corruption and deceit that might discredit her, the dead man’s memory, the vice president who also wants to succeed him, the party, government agencies and all.

The murderer is dead too; but it seems too easy to brand him as a nut, close the case and move on to everyday malfeasance. There must be more that would explain what happened: perhaps in the shooter’s past, perhaps in the first couple’s, perhaps in a property deal that long ago made money for an aspiring governor and his wife, perhaps in the murky blood sports of the CIA. Through this noisome maze, in search of the “Deep Background,” a presidential aide, Nick Addis, threads his way in wary alliance with the disgraced head of White House security and with a woman analyst for the CIA. They pick their paths through minefields; witnesses, associates, suspects drop like flies; and when the murderer’s motives finally come to light, no one’s the better for it.

David Corn is an old Washington hand, and he has written a slaughterous scorcher of a book you don’t want to put down. It isn’t just the carnage, the suspense and the scrutiny of our country’s masters spinning scurrilous webs. But the miasmic spectacle of political promiscuity that Corn etches reminds us how liberty and authority are nowadays reconciled as long as authorities take what liberties they want, and how, with politics a wholly owned subsidiary of the media, public service has become a contradiction in terms. Americans long ago gave up expecting their representatives to act by the moral standards of other citizens. Nowadays, all share similar standards, all evade the same responsibilities and all agree no one need pay the bill. Just charge it.

Moving from the East Coast to the MidWest, we find duplicity, deception and dirty tricks reenacted on the local level in V.I. Warshawski’s Chicago. This time, Sara Paretsky’s pugnacious P.I. stops to help a woman lying in the street and finds herself embroiled in a squalid and disconcerting web of trouble. Trouble is Warshawski’s element; but in “Hard Time,” the offal runs off the pages. Fetid corporations, defiled detectives, turpitudinous moguls, wealthy wire-pullers, peccant politicians, competitive consorts and, finally, a cesspool of private security and prison services demonstrate that, for Paretsky’s readers, too much is never enough.

The same holds true for V.I., who returns in great form to denounce the mistreatment of helpless immigrants, the rankness and degradation of women’s prisons and the shady snares of media conglomerates. As usual, she talks too much, and as usual her mouthing off aggravates sticky situations. But that’s what we expect of V.I. Defiant, sardonic, ostentatious, she stirs every hornet’s nestsand breasts the murkiest currents to emerge vindicated and triumphant in the end.

Body counts wane vertiginously when the venue shifts from the shores of Lake Michigan to England’s Dorset coast. One battered body only, a traumatized 3-year-old, a handful of suspects and no corrupt cops: It sounds like an economy cast for inconsequent horrors. But the naked, raped dead woman has also had her fingers broken (hence the title, “The Breaker”). Besides, England is a small island, and the scope of maleficence turns out no less compelling for being crowded on a narrow canvas. Minette Walters’ thrillers are no less thrilling for avoiding massed evildoers and probing only individual minds.

As the police sort through grudging evidence, reluctant clues and multifarious lies before they can focus on the killer, Walters keeps us speculating with them, trailing first one suspect,then another, and cheering on the good guys, who prove no less relentless for being less violent. She calls it a psychological thriller, and who is to gainsay her? Mainly, though, it is a smashing read that invites one to make tracks for sunny southwest England.

Younger half-brother of the novelist Henry Fielding, Sir John Fielding (1721-80) was a magistrate, noted for his reform of London’s criminal courts, his foundation of a police force and his share in setting up a small body of professional detectives. An accident in his teens had left him blind, but he was rumored to recognize 3,000 thieves by their voices, and criminal identification was one of his interests, along with the protection of juvenile offenders. This is the man whom Bruce Alexander chose as his master detective in a series of winning and vivid historical whodunits. He’s aided by a 16-year-old, Jeremy Proctor, whom he has saved from prison, taken into his household and is training for the legal profession.

In “Death of a Colonial,” the sixth of the John Fielding series, instead of a whodunit, Alexander offers a lively whoisit. A noble lord, apparently last of his line, has been executed, and his estate is set to go to the crown, when a long-missing brother reappears to claim the succession. Where has he been? Is he the heir he claims to be? Will he make his case? Sir John and seeing-eye Jeremy are detailed to make inquiries, and the investigation they pursue reveals as much about the material and social conditions of Georgian England, its pecking order and discomforts, as it does about the claimant. The trail of murderers, impostors, scholars, double-dealers, criminals noble and ignoble leads to a satisfactory conclusion. As Sir John observes, some actions are not illegal, simply immoral. On the other hand, some resolutions that are barely legal are not too immoral either.*