LA CONFIDENTIAL

In Robert Crais’ “Demolition Angel,” Bomb Squad agent Carol Starkey survives an explosion that leaves her partner dead. Not fully recovered three years later, still dependent on gin and Tagamet, Starkey, Detective-2 with the LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Section, is assigned to lead an investigation into the death of another agent who was also blown up trying to defuse an explosive device. In the process, she has to contend with office politics, a mercurial partner, a dubiously supportive lieutenant and a special agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Washington who horns in on her case.

All the while, a calculating maniac known as “Mr. Red” is blowing up bits of the world for fame, fun and profit. Creatures of his sort should be drowned at birth, or as soon as their proclivities are known. Failing that, the perp has to be nailed before he spreads more havoc. Sometimes at cross-purposes, sometimes working together, Starkey and her team try to pin him down, and so does ATF agent Jack Pell. But Mr. Red is as much a master of deception as he is of stealthy pursuit, and Starkey’s snare-strewn trail leads in ever more unexpected directions.

Hunter and hunted both, Starkey’s sights keep shifting. But she keeps rummaging among the bomb-loon crowd and discovers a multitude of cyber-cranks who lurk on Web sites and in chat rooms. Anyone who thinks that computers represent progress should read about the helpful hints to be picked up on the Internet about bomb construction and about the animals (including human ones) set aflame or blown apart by compu-fiends.

As she zeros in on Mr. Red, Starkey transcends traps and tergiversators. She grows back from the scarred, self-destructive drunk she had become to be the resolute professional she used to be. The action is relentless, and super-craftsman Crais keeps readers on edge through more twists and turns than those of a giant slalom.

In “The Fifth Woman,” Henning Mankell serves up another nut: a female sociopath “addicted to the sacred task that justice was holy” (something only a lunatic would believe) and that justice means death for those who catch her ire. Four French nuns have been slaughtered in Algeria, presumably by terrorists, and a fifth woman, a Swede who had moved in with them, has had her throat cut. In faraway Sweden, where the story unfolds, that woman’s daughter is going to exact serial and cruel vengeance for the crime, not on the actual perpetrators but on others whose brutal deeds evoke those of the unseen Algerians.

Police Inspector Kurt Wallander and his close-knit team will have to blunder and hack their way through a murky, meandering case, while trying to figure out links between crimes that are apparently unconnected except for their bizarre brutality and the deliberation of their planning and execution.

Pivotal in all Mankell mysteries, Wallander is his usual lonely, reflective, professional self, and resolution comes not by revelation but by dogged police work, carried out by fallible but competent conscientious veterans of the trade. They don’t have an easy job, and Mankell, as he usually does, throws in a tour of Sweden’s socio-psychological world as supplement to suspense.

The country is prosperous, but violence grows worse, and breaches of the peace, less part of national tradition than in the U.S., stand out more starkly than they do here. Ill paid, poorly equipped, barely respected, constantly criticized, the undermanned police must also cope with a vigilante movement that complicates their work: a “citizen militia” formed to make up for their alleged shortcomings. A policeman’s life is not easy, but it is interesting and certainly less life-threatening than in the States.

In the end, though, and I give away no state secrets, “The Fifth Woman” is about abused women and abusing men, about the need to end the horror or else to end its agents and about exacting justice when no justice can be had in other, perhaps more civilized, ways. Who will find the man who killed the Swedish woman in Algeria? Who will hunt him down, identify and stop him? No one, of course.

In Robert Tannenbaum’s “True Justice,” the mood is more wryly upbeat. Butch Karp is chief assistant district attorney for the county of New York. Marlene Ciompi, who ran a private security service for women being stalked but gave it up after shooting yet another over-intrepid brute, is now a lawyer.

Both Karp and Ciompi are literate, articulate, fun and so are their children, especially Lucy, the elder, a student of the “ladies”--teaching nuns--of the Sacred Heart and a paid-up member of the Save-the-World Marching Band. Karp and Ciompi are also smart, honest and aggressive (most lawyers are just two of the above), and their marriage rolls merrily along on a diet of wary semi-adversarial relations and jocular remarks spiced by buoyant affection.

Karp manages a system in which more than 400 assistant district attorneys deal with 300,000 serious crimes each year, including three murders a day. But his attention will be focused on a small rash of infanticides: three abandoned neonate babies in one week, one dead of exposure, one smothered and one torn to pieces by dogs fighting over its nutritional possibilities.

While courts and press gnaw on the new flavor of the month, the parents of one of Lucy’s friends are offed in a high-profile double murder. Lucy’s missionary instincts get her and her father into hot water, and her mother--warm, delicious, but always half-a-bubble off center--is drawn into another high-profile case, also about an infanticide.

After much discussion of the moral complexities of legal complexities, everything works out in the end: infanticide, of course, but also scumbag-on-scumbag murders, the American romance with violence, the law as “a sort of prosthesis society had invented to substitute for justice,” the administration of law by prosecutorial foot soldiers less concerned with carrying it out than with moving the system along and by judges whose prime qualification for office is being some politician’s pal. These and other encouraging apercus, deftly handled, for once enhance the text rather than retard it.

A respected trial lawyer and derisive Daumier of the legal trades, Tannenbaum teaches advanced criminal procedure at Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley’s law school. His wit alone is worth the price of admission. If you’re as familiar with the system as he is, you’d better learn to laugh if you don’t want to cry.