L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

A pro, that’s what T. Jefferson Parker is. His plots are intricate, keenly crafted, clearly mapped; his characters complicated, yet consistent; their dialogue subordinate to fast-moving action. Clues and misdirections are fairly sown about, puzzles are plausibly unraveled, the narrative world is eventually restored to order even when, as in “Silent Joe,” its prelapsarian state is habitual disorder.

Many mysteries turn about loss and grief often, though not always, caused by murder. Parker connects these with loyalty and betrayal, but, most originally in our squishy age, with hatred and revenge. Hatred may be too strong a brew for current compassionate conventions; vengeance too demanding an exercise for irresolute, unresourceful mortals. There are those, though, who will not sleep soundly till they avenge a wrong, and Silent Joe is one of them. Disfigured as a little boy, Joe’s true father is the man who adopted him and whose name he bears. Now an Orange County supervisor involved in tricky and obscure transactions, Will Trona is gunned down at the outset. Seized by a cold passion for revenge, Joe, a sheriff’s deputy, sets out to find not just who did it, but who had it done. The worldy-wise Candide’s quest for vindication exposes the blemished Orange jungle, its smeared legal and social systems, its scarred denizens, himself included.

We learn a great deal about Orange County politics, expensive private clubs, expansive public figures, salvation-for-hire, equal opportunity crime and jails, and we learn a little about police psychiatrists: “He kept asking me about remorse and denial and anger and sublimation. I could tell I wasn’t telling him what he wanted to hear.” And we heed a defaced hero who’s not afraid of anything, which is just as well, since there is much to fear. But Joe Trona triumphs, and flawed justice too. Joe’s going to make a good cop someday. Soon.

Stephen Cannell’s latest is also about corruption in high places, indeed in most places. “The Tin Collectors” is a product of the what-else-is-new school of hard-boiled fiction featuring soft-boiled heroes battling rotten cops, pols and multiplex people of wealth: just what the doctor ordered in the wake of would-be Staples Center scams and Rampart scandals. Joseph Wambaugh’s blue knights no longer hold the line twixt order and havoc; they represent ruction, disruption, spoliation.

The conventions of police procedurals where police work as a team are turned on their heads: Here criminals work as a team, while the lone-wolf hero, ostracized and cynical, falls back on uncertain friends and on LAPD’s Guide to Discipline: “Principles serve to govern conduct when there are no rules.”

LAPD Det. Sgt. Shane Scully is framed to take the fall for shooting a brutish police lieutenant who shot at him first. Caught in a web of skulduggery and deception, he is forced to delve into mazy conspiracies that he must fathom and expose to clear himself. Shane finds an unexpected ally in an operative of the Internal Affairs Bureau (the tin--badge--collectors of the title), who has a rep for running down rogue cops: the beautiful, severe Alexa Hamilton. Together, Shane and Alexa probe, hack and shoot their way through L.A.’s fetid, feral fauna and its pervasive turpitudes until Scully is vindicated and neither detective is solitary any longer.

We’ve read it all before, or perhaps saw the trailer. That doesn’t make the book less ripping. The action pelts along. It thrills as a thriller should. There are nerve-racking moments but no dull ones. Cannell serves up edge-of-the-seat reading that takes little chewing and is driving full tilt for the screen.