L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

“Final Acts” is a mishmash of idealism and horror, sensation and sentiment, political correctness and aberrant cults. A cult is a deviant religious sect with its own form of worship; and, oh boy, are Alex Abella’s cultists ferociously deviant! Girls slaughtered, skinned alive, hacked to death, heads chopped off: Blood-stained offerings to dark spirits and the credulous cuckoos who obey their demands spill out of his pages. Like the Ebola virus, a sanguinary coven has oozed out of Africa into Cuba. Like mambo, salsa and other strains (but far less fun), it has seeped to the mainland (specifically, to California), with its nightmare rituals and its muddied hopes.

A Cuban who becomes a California attorney who has studied such cults and written books about them, Charlie Morell knows too much. Not just about Santeria, the marriage of Catholicism and Africanized saints; but about Abakua, whose screwy sectarians worship a god who lives in a well and craves human life for reincarnation. Framed by the Abakua to take the fall for murders they have committed, Charlie enlists the services of a smart Mexican American attorney, Rita Carr, and of Cuban security services, which turn out to be more effective than our own (perhaps because they know what he’s up against).

Expectably, good (and the Cuban security services) triumphs over evil. But it’s a close call, and the encounter leaves dead and wounded in its wake. Meanwhile Abella, born in Havana and a veteran of media sensation-mongering, sharply etches conditions in Cuba (rough), police shenanigans in California (rougher), relations between lawyers and legal authorities (still rougher) and predictable reactions to cultists who fall off the deep end. “These people are sick,” Rita comments. “‘No, Rita,” Charlie answers: “They are evil.”

The story is told in two voices set apart by two kinds of typeface: one for Rita, the sleuth-attorney; the other, less digestible, for Charlie. The two and their interlocutors interlard their days with Hispanic phrases, food, drink, song and dance, which is sometimes pleasing. I find it harder to understand why a middle-aged lawyer indicted for murder in L.A. should express himself in English so orotund as to verge on flatulence. Rita Carr’s style, like her persona, is more lively. Perhaps that’s the idea.

Whether you consider “Final Acts” sprightly or overwritten, good sentiments run through the book and, if they don’t make you giggle, they may move you--toward the exit or toward “Red Angel,” in which good feelings make only fleeting appearances. Ollie Pitts, the New York detective, is more representative of its rough grain. When told that “in Cuba we accept suffering,” he counters that suffering sucks. “Anybody makes you suffer, you should break something on their body.”

By William Heffernan’s account, suffering and its infliction are as rife in Cuba and in its gallimaufry of religions as is the breaking of body parts; and “Red Angel” abounds in lectures about what one of its heroes describes as lunatic voodoo worship.

Clearly voodoo is in style; it is with it, it is cool. So is Cuba, a trip to which is becoming a must for crime writers, who can then take it off income tax. That is what Heffernan must have done; and his book reads like an extended dissertation on the island, its dire economic conditions, its corrupt political personnel, its magnificent beaches, its prostituted maidens and its murderous folklore.

Cuba of course lies far from New York, but getting there is half the fun. A desiccated don, John “the Boss” Rossi, head of a Mafia family whose criminal enterprises stretch from the Empire State to Miami and Las Vegas, is wasting away. Loath to make tracks for the great cannoli factory in the sky, he conspires with venal Cuban high officials and vicious voodoo priests to have himself rejuvenated in a necromantic rite that involves the murder and cook-up of a woman whose vital forces will revivify him. The designated victim turns out to be a medical doctor and heroine of the Castro revolution widely adored as the Red Angel because of her work with poor children. She’s also the favorite aunt of Adrianna Mendez, live-in ladylove of New York detective Paul Devlin, whom the mayor has just appointed to squelch the city’s gang wars. Paul, Adrianna and Ollie Pitts head for the offshore coast so dear to Hemingway, where Rossi, who passionately hates Devlin for past disrespectings, has made arrangements for Devlin’s murder by the Abakua.

You remember the Abakua. But I hope you’re still with me, because this is where things start to jump. It is Cuba’s midnight. The regime is disintegrating, the natives are restless, ambitious time-servers seek alternative troughs, Mafia families from the mainland plot to turn the isle into a base for gambling and the drug trade. Suspicion spreads like smog over Havana; fear eddies out of eerie ceremonies in spooky forest glades under a sullen moon. The scary mysteries leave the Americans incredulously astonished, even though they would swallow them whole on Channel 13. And this makes their naivete a bit incredible, but it permits the author to fudge most explanations for inexplicable goings-on. Not quite inexplicable, however, for the secret police are still hard at work, unraveling criminal conspiracies, ignoring proper procedure, cutting through the Jell-o that sillies take for granted. Thanks to them, good voodoo triumphs over bad voodoo, Rossi is routed, the Mafia discomfited, the Abakua discombobulated, Castro makes a benign appearance and Paul and Adrianna will return home to live happily ever after until next time.

Heffernan’s dialogue is stilted, his constructions clumsy, his characters are thin; but the suspense is fine, and the pace of writing makes one look out for the next jiggery-pokery to jump out of the nganga (caldron). Never, the chief of the secret police advises Devlin, “never underestimate powers you do not understand.” Magic is fine as long as it snuffs out scumbags.

Like Charlie Morell, James Patterson’s black detective, Alex Cross, is not a lucky man--unless surviving friends and lovers counts as luck. First his wife is murdered, then his girlfriend is traumatized by kidnapping and his daughter becomes subject to seizures that call for a life-threatening operation. One wonders where Alex finds time and energy to run down the sociopath whose trail covers the nation’s capital and surrounding counties with more slime and blood than politics leave behind.

Patterson’s intricate plots are notable for their atmospheric pressure, fraught features and a grim overhang whose moments of relief lapse into havoc. In “Roses are Red,” as in its predecessors, venom and violence reign; routine robberies, triumphant identifications of suspects and sentimental interludes only lead to more ghoulishness. For 400 pages, Cross, the D.C. police, the FBI, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all pursue a killer who struts his sadism because he likes to make victims suffer and the media marvel at his invincibility. For far too long the fiend who thinks of himself as the Mastermind turns out to be as impregnable as Conan Doyle’s Napoleon of Crime, Professor Moriarty. And that, as Cross tells his (latest) FBI girlfriend, is scary as hell.

Enhanced by the Bill Clinton rubber masks the killer likes to sport, Patterson’s Halloween entertainment seems designed to discourage the keenest opponents of the death penalty. If, as Cross puts it, the villain is “a really sick puppy,” the puppy has the fangs of a pit bull. And some of the action appropriately unfolds in a lunatic asylum--which may be Patterson’s excuse for not playing fair and laying down no motivation trail, except that the guy is nuts. The tale baffles, goads, provokes; and its major message seems to be that it is insane to spare murderous maniacs just because they are insane.