Ex-Con Gambles on One Last Heist in a Masterful Piece of Noir

Something about Las Vegas brings out the best in Michael Connelly. His 1997 novel, “Trunk Music,” set in that semi-mythical city to the Northeast, was one of the strongest entries in his popular Harry Bosch series. His new Bosch-less tale, “Void Moon” (Warner, $24.95, 391 pages), much of which unfolds in the gambler’s paradise, is that rarity--a riveting, breathless thriller that not only sucks you in completely, it leaves you with the satisfying feeling that you haven’t been wasting your time on brain candy.

The boiled-down plot is basic noir--ex-con forsakes straight and narrow for one final heist; caper turns sour; thief is on the run--but what Connelly does with it is nothing short of magical. His antihero is a resourceful young woman named Cassie Black whose intriguing back story he parcels out in tantalizing bits and pieces. The job she undertakes is the difficult burgling of a high roller’s suite at the Cleopatra (an inspired name).

Security is state of the art, primarily because the casino-hotel suffered a similar robbery that resulted in the death of the thief and the arrest of his accomplice. Cassie was, of course, the accomplice, and the dead man was not only her partner but her lover. Before returning to the scene of that crime, literally, she’s warned by an astrology-minded associate that there will be a void moon on the night of the robbery--a “bad luck time” when the moon is between houses.

As the caper progresses, described in meticulous, suspenseful detail, Cassie is drawn inevitably into void moon time. We know this means trouble, but, again, Connelly rises above the predictable by creating a fascinating antagonist in Jack Karch--Vegas-born and -bred private eye, bon vivant, sleight-of-hand artist and relentless, psychopathic hit man. Locals know him as Jack of Spades because of his amiable card tricks, but to the Cleo’s manager, the nickname refers to Karch’s penchant for burying his victims in the desert. Like his quarry, Karch is carrying quite a load of history around with him.

As hunted and hunter race across the shadowy landscape, Connelly, no slouch at literary sleight of hand, picks just the right moments to turn over pieces of their past or give the chase an unexpected shuffle. There are several suspense novels decorating the bestseller lists, but for style and substance along with thrilling action, “Void Moon” is the only game in town.

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After 14 novels in which Depression-era detective Carl Wilcox engaged in a number of one-book romances, author Harold Adams unhesitatingly marched him down the altar at the end of his last series entry, “No Badge, No Gun.” This shift in a protagonist’s marital status can be fatal. But, as is evident in the new “Lead, So I Can Follow” (Walker, $22.95, 219 pages), the beautiful and level-headed Hazel, Wilcox’s new mate in mystery-solving as well as life, is so engaging, the matrimonial change works like a charm.

The Wilcoxes are on a backpack-and-canoe honeymoon along the St. Croix River when a gunshot leads them to a wounded man lying on railroad tracks. Carl rescues him from an oncoming freight train only to discover that he’s saved a corpse, and one with few mourners. The victim had been an obnoxious college jazz musician who’d recently tried to rape the popular girl singer in his band. Could any detective worth the name fail to find out more, even on his honeymoon?

Carl and Hazel are mixing marriage and murder during the same historic period as Nick and Nora Charles, the early 1930s, but they couldn’t be more unlike Dashiell Hammett’s famously sophisticated and alcoholic pair. These firmly planted Midwesterners favor affection over affectation and the wide open spaces over gin joints. They’re good company, comfortable to be around, exactly what we should expect from a prizewinning crime novelist with a style so clean and compelling even the most complicated homicide seems credible and uncontrived.

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Just as Adams’ well-informed novels return us to Midwestern America at a simpler time, Ed Gorman’s emerging series about small-town lawyer-detective Sam McCain provides its own richly evocative portrait of the Midwest two decades later. McCain’s debut novel, “The Day the Music Died,” began on the night Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper took their fatal flight. The new “Wake Up Little Susie” (Carroll & Graff, $22.95, 225 pages) starts with the unveiling of the Edsel motor car, a difficult enough event for Ford dealers everywhere but especially for the one in McCain’s town of Black River Falls, Iowa, who finds a dead body in the trunk of a floor model. Sam is a likably fallible young hero, and his hunt for the murderer is as tricky and engaging as any mystery fan would wish. But what distinguishes this enjoyable series are Gorman’s descriptions of what small-town America was like in the middle of the 1900s--the good times, pulsating with the beat of the then-new rock ‘n’ roll, and the bad, marked by such tarnished realities as police brutality, racism, redbaiting and H-bomb fever.

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