Plumbing the Grisly Nether Regions of a Santeria Blood Cult

Happy holidays. Alex Abella’s aptly titled new novel, “Final Acts” (Simon & Schuster, $25, 301 pages), may not be totally appropriate fare for the jolly season, but it’s worth picking up in the New Year. In it, Abella lowers the lid on the Pandora’s box of murder, mayhem and mysticism he opened nearly a decade ago in “The Killing of the Saints.” That novel introduced readers to Carlos Charlie Morell, a Cuban American lawyer who’d left professional and family problems in Miami to start life anew in Los Angeles. Pushed by the court into defending a Cuban refugee accused of murder, Morell began an investigation of the religious cult known as Santeria with results both bloody and bizarre.

In the 1998 sequel, “Dead of Night,” Morell was pitted against a Santeria sorcerer who practiced grotesque blood sacrifices. “Acts” finds Morell once again opposing the Santeria cultists who have gone to elaborate lengths to frame him for a series of ritual murders. Fortunately, Abella has provided his hero with a formidable ally--Rita Carr, a tough-talking, quick-thinking attorney he turns to for his defense.

Carr, a practical, down-to-earth Mexican American, is in fact, the perfect counterpart to the demon-haunted Morell. The novel consists of their alternating first-person narratives. Carr’s is filled with recognizable details, ranging from real-life name-dropping to amusing cityscapes (“A stretch limo eased out of the gated entrance to Laughlin Park, where Chaplin and DeMille once, briefly, held court . . . through the driver’s rolled-down window I thought I recognized the pudgy cheeks of Mariah Carey.”). They anchor and intensify Morell’s fantastic visions of the spiritual battle of good and evil.

“Acts” covers a lot of territory--from courtroom to sacrificial temple, from California to Cuba to Mexico and back again--as it heads toward its terrifying finale. Abella’s descriptive powers are commanding, whether focusing on Cuban Americans at work and play or cultists summoning their demons from hell. It’s a riveting work that, one hopes, will serve to launch Rita Carr on a series of her own.

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Jeffery Deaver’s “Speaking in Tongues” (Simon & Schuster, $25, 334 pages) is like “Cape Fear” on steroids. It’s a supra-nasty, but unquestionably suspenseful, tale of revenge in which a world-class psycho, for a reason similar to the one that motivated “Fear’s” murderous ex-con, feels compelled to toy with members of the Tate Collier family before destroying them. In this case, it’s not the hapless, guilt-ridden former lawyer Collier who commands our attention, but his angry, self-conscious and alienated daughter, Megan. Her kidnapping and psychological reprogramming are the key elements in the madman’s devious (Deaverous?) plan. The villain is smooth and beguiling for all his insanity, but the girl who refers to herself as Crazy Megan may be able to hold her own, if only she can clear her jumbled mind, break free from the locked room and avoid the attack dog. For many of his recent books, Deaver has delivered a shocker late in the tale that helps to distract the reader from holes in the plot. Here, the surprise is less than stunning, suggesting perhaps that the author had more confidence in his characters and story. If so, the confidence has not been misplaced.

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“Too Rich and Too Thin” by David Champion (Allen A. Knoll, $22, 212 pages) falls into that very narrow subgenre of mysteries narrated by a private eye working for his father’s law firm. The only other one that comes to mind is the Archy McNally series created by the late Lawrence Sanders. Unlike the glib, snide and super-efficient Archy, whose relationship with his aristocratic father is markedly understated, Tod Hanson is an awkward, emotionally immature young man who stutters in the presence of his overbearing dad, Bomber, a flamboyant legal eagle of the Perry Mason school.

“Too Rich,” the fifth outing for the California-based Hansons, involves a supermodel accused of murdering a world-famous fashion designer. The plot of the novel, with characters ranging from egomaniacal photographers and ditzy models to Vegas mobsters, is breezy, undemanding entertainment. The Hansons’ father-son dynamics are a bit more complicated and considerably more interesting.

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Finally, if you’re looking for that last-minute stocking stuffer, or even if you’re not, pick up a copy of “100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century,” selected and described by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Assn. (Crum Creek Press, $12, 160 pages). As the trade paperback’s editor Jim Huang explains, “What we have in common is our love of mysteries, and our eagerness to share this passion with you.”

Each title, ranging from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles” to Michael Connelly’s “The Concrete Blonde,” is the subject of a short essay by one of the booksellers. I should note that my Christmas will be a little brighter thanks to inclusion of 1985’s “Sleeping Dog,” my first novel, which has just been reprinted by the Poisoned Pen Press.

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