L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

If you take the M1 north from London, past Leicester and Nottingham toward Sheffield, you will see the Pennines, upland spine of England, appear on your left, along with the Peak District’s scenic dales and hills. If you bear left at Chesterfield toward Chatsworth House and its glorious parklands, then north again to Castleton and Edale, you will be in the most spectacular section of Peak National Park: walking trails and perilous country roads, breathtaking scenery, wild moorlands of peat and heather, sleepy villages, struggling farms and lots of tourists. The best time to view the Park’s somber glories is in late autumn or early winter, when low-hanging clouds brood over deserted moors. That’s the time of year when Stephen Booth has set his creepy crime novel “Dancing With the Virgins”--unhurried, convoluted, suspenseful and supremely engaging.

Booth’s Edendale is pretty much Edale; and on its fictitious Ringham Moor, nine primeval stone “Virgins” dance to the strains of an equally petrified “Fiddler.” That’s where a female rambler is knifed and disfigured by an unknown assailant, where soon afterward a female cyclist is stabbed to death, then yet a third woman is attacked by a copycat. More aggressions follow: a moldering body turns up; there are assaults, maulings, suicides, even illegal pit bull fights in a barn at night. Natives flounder desperately to save farms in which their lives are invested. Disturbed civilians, distracted park rangers and police are haunted not just by immediate perils but by memories that won’t surface or else won’t go away. Amid the tribulations of Edendale’s tainted Eden, they dance their sad saraband before they are maimed or die or drop out of the story.

It’s all too much for E Division of the undermanned, underbudgeted Derbyshire Constabulary. But its members cope with it as policemen and policewomen do, civil to civilians, blundering, lucking out, pursuing promising suspects and red herrings, watching their step and their surroundings and more or less closing the case in the end. Booth has done a wonderful job: The local color is sober, the luminosity is stark, the tale he tells engrossing, and if we sigh when turning the last page it is because life’s like that, and nonetheless we wish there was more of it.

Barry Maitland is a master of mysteries and his latest, “The Chalon Heads,” is a crafty and well-crafted showpiece of the genre. This time the leitmotif is stamp collecting. Eva, the young and beautiful wife of a much older Cockney millionaire of Chinese origin, is kidnapped. Her distraught husband, Sammy Starling (a.k.a. Sammy Chin) is an avid philatelist; and his wife’s ransom is to be an incredibly valuable 19th century Chalon Head stamp depicting the young Queen Victoria (who looks much like Eva), as Alfred Edward Chalon sketched her when she came to the throne in 1837. But the ransom stamp turns out to be a forgery, Eva turns up gruesomely murdered and police inquiries reveal a swarm of further forgeries and frauds.

Scotland Yard’s Fraud Squad and its Serious Crime Branch investigate, hunting the evildoers through London and its environs. But only doughty Detective Sergeant Kathy Kolla can’t be distracted by false clues or satisfied with half-solutions. Refusing to rest on her comrades’ findings, she drives the story to an unexpected, wry, yet satisfying, finale. Altogether an intricate and maze-like tale well told and well worth the telling.

Lawrence Block’s “Hope to Die” begins with a senseless murder and robbery of an innocent New York couple and meanders past more murders perpetrated by a faceless creep whose identity is never revealed. As one detective comments, “The crime rate’s down, but the guys out there are trying to make up for it by being twice as nasty.” That is the essence of Block’s noir narrative: lots of random violence, depravity aplenty and hapless men and women caught in webs of existential absurdity. This is what has made him a best-selling author and, as the blurb says, what earns him a place in the pantheon of legendary crime writers.

Matthew Scudder, Block’s durably unlicensed private eye, has been sober for 18 years: more years than he was a cop before becoming an ex-cop. When the burglars who turned their trade to gore are murdered in their turn, the police close the case. Scudder suspects that there was more to it; between AA meetings and concerts at Lincoln Center he tracks the baneful spoor through a tangle of corpses. Both perpetrator and motive remain obscure, at least to Scudder and Co., but butchery peters out when the rabid maniac abandons the city for more comfortable hunting elsewhere. Readers who like gratuitous bloodshed need not fear, however: The carnage is suspended only pro tem.