Hip Sleuth Ages Nicely in ‘Lost Coast’

When Roger L. Simon awoke his counterculture sleuth Moses Wine from a nine-year literary nap with the 1997 mystery “The Lost Coast,” few of his fans got the word. As Simon says in an introduction to the new trade edition (ibooks, $14, 256 pages), “Not only did [his publisher] not advertise or promote the book . . . they printed it on paper so cheap the pages started to turn brown around the edges before the books even got out of the stores.” Rude treatment for one of the more entertaining and emotionally charged entries in the popular series.

In “Coast,” the rebellious spirit that motivated “the people’s detective” in his 1973 debut novel, “The Big Fix,” seems to have been inherited by his son, Simon, with tragic results. A member of an eco-terrorist group in Northern California, the young Wine is being sought by the police for a tree-spiking that resulted in a logger’s death. Moses motors north from L.A. to do what he can for the boy. Not only does he have to deal with smarmy lawmen, aggressive militants on both sides of the logging issue and a ruthless cadre of killers, he’s faced with a seemingly ungrateful child, a hostile ex-wife and his former best friend with whom said wife had the affair that put paid to their marriage.

Author Simon provides us with action, suspense, humor and bright dialogue aplenty, but it’s his narrator-detective’s approach to life that has distinguished this series. In “The Lost Coast,” middle age may have shaken his confidence and smoothed the edge of his hipster attitude, but fueled by fatherly love, Moses Wine is still a force to reckon with and to read with pleasure.

*

Les Standiford’s “Black Mountain” (Putnam, $23.95, 320 pages) takes us to a section of Wyoming wilderness where a politically ambitious New York governor has arranged a mountain trek designed to get his presidential campaign off on the right rugged footing. Gov. Fielding Dawson has invited friends, a reporter, a documentary film crew and assorted hired hands to accompany him and his wife on a rigorous expedition. Along as the pol’s special bodyguard is Richard Corrigan, NYC subway cop picked for this special duty after rescuing Dawson from one of Manhattan’s homeless. Also present are a sophisticated, thoroughly ruthless pair of assassins who’ve been hired to turn the trek into a death march to be blamed on the state’s militiamen.

After the group is thinned down by a few “accidents,” a character references “Ten Little Indians,” the Agatha Christie classic in which weekend guests at an island estate are bumped off one by one. “Black Mountain” is actually a shrewdly plotted mix of “Indians” and James Dickey’s survival epic “Deliverance.”

Standiford, who usually writes about Florida contractor and crime magnet John Deal, provides this thriller with an agreeable and refreshingly vulnerable new hero. Still reeling from his father’s suicide (which he witnessed), stunned by the destructive force of a devastating ice storm, outclassed by his murderous opponents who, unlike him, seem quite at home in the wilderness, Corrigan struggles on nobly. You couldn’t ask for a better man to have on the trail.

*

Trying to remember who writes those funny mysteries about New Orleans hairdresser Claire Claiborne or the name of the 12th century merchant’s daughter who’s featured in Sharan Newman’s medieval mysteries? Looking for a novel about a Washington, D.C., restaurant critic or a mystery set in Seattle featuring an ex-lounge singer? You’ll be happy to learn that the answers to these and just about any other question you might have involving crime fiction penned by living women are to be found in the new edition of “Detecting Women” (Purple Moon Press, 478 pages, $44.95 hardcover; $34.95 paperback). Edited by Willetta L. Heising, this remarkable reader’s guide features author biographies, bibliographies, series descriptions, pseudonyms, awards and listings by titles, characters, settings and chronology. (Curious about the questions? The respective answers: Sophie Dunbar, Catherine LeVendeur, “Murder on the Gravy Train” by Phyllis Richman and K.K. Beck’s “Cold Smoked.”)

*

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