A Cagey Sleuth in a Complicated Plot With Contempt for Texas

At the end of James Crumley’s 1996 novel, “Border-snakes,” Milo Milodragovich, one of his series’ heroes, was left with a weariness for the wild life and, thanks to an inheritance and a big score, enough money to give it up. Instead of returning to his beloved Montana, he decided to “take the long chance” and settle down in Texas with a red-haired veterinarian named Betty Porterfield. In “The Final Country” (Mysterious Press, $24.95, 310 pages), a considerably more controlled and more powerful novel, we learn that the chance hasn’t quite paid off. “As our love failed,” he explains, “I found myself homesick for Montana more often than now and again.” Bored with the soft life and looking for a reason to close out the relationship, he goes back on the private eye prowl in Texas. The book begins with his arrival at a bar and grill to look for a wayward wife.

He finds her, but he also meets a towering African American, no “larger than a church,” fresh out of prison and ready to rock the house, searching for a woman he left behind. The giant ends his stay by killing the bar’s manager but, by then, he and Milo have made a connection and the sleuth decides to help him. If this opener has a familiar feel it’s because it closely parallels the beginning of Raymond Chandler’s “Farewell, My Lovely.” Back in 1940, Philip Marlowe was looking for a wayward husband, not a wife, and the big ex-con was white, confused that his girlfriend’s former place of business had become a black club.

The similarity is intended, I imagine, as are the contemporary changes. Crumley has never shied away from his debt to Chandler. “We cover some of the same ground,” he once wrote, “his dark streets in L.A., my twisted highways in the mountain West. But because of the events surrounding the Vietnam War, my detectives are not as comfortable with traditional morality as Philip Marlowe ... my vision of justice is less clear-cut, perhaps more complex, more confused.”

All of this is apparent in “Country,” with Milo filling in the space between his “Farewell” bookends by blazing a bullets-and-blood, booze-and-cocaine trail across Texas, with side trips to Las Vegas and Montana. His physically self-destructive investigation involves a 20-year-old murder, drugs, a land scam, several elaborate cons and, almost incidentally, a serial killer. The distinctive characters, none of them outright sinners or saints, are shrewdly observed, but they do add up.

Somehow Crumley manages to fit all of them and his multiple plot elements together in a surprisingly neat package, while still allowing Milo the luxury of observing the effects of turning 60 while continuing an eloquent book-long denunciation of the Lone Star state. “I’ll sure as hell never go back to Texas again,” the battered but unbowed sleuth tells us at novel’s end. One suspects that goes double for native son Crumley.

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A prominent Century City plastic surgeon is murdered along with two of his staffers in Rochelle Krich’s “Shadows of Sin” (Morrow, $25, 337 pages), leaving series sleuth LAPD homicide Det. Jessie Drake and her partner, Phil Okum, with a long list of prime suspects. Included are the doc’s wife, a too-perfect daughter, a troubled foster son who has gone missing, the boy’s birth father, a patient profoundly unhappy with her nose job and a recently fired nurse.

Uncovering the murdered man’s family secrets is a full-time job, but Jessie’s own family will not be denied. Her difficult mother, an upscale La Jolla matron whose recently exposed past at least begins to explain her abusive behavior toward her children, pauses in her usual litany of complaints about Jessie’s chosen profession, her recent commitment to Judaism and her unmarried status, to demand that she investigate her father. Is Arthur Claypool having an affair as Mom suspects, or is it something even more disturbing?

The Anthony Award-winning Krich cleverly mixes professional and personal mysteries as she steadily applies pressure to her overworked heroine. The writing is crisp and compelling, the police work convincingly detailed, the ending both suspenseful and satisfying.

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Linda Fairstein, who has been head prosecutor for the sex-crimes unit of the district attorney’s office in Manhattan for 25 years, has used that considerable experience to create a bestselling series featuring the similarly employed Alexandra Cooper. The newest addition, “The Deadhouse” (Scribner, $25, 415 pages), offers, along with the author’s usual beguiling mix of murder, romance and suspense, an intriguing history lesson involving the titular building, an ominous structure on Roosevelt Island in the middle of the East River that two centuries ago served as a smallpox sanitarium for quarantined patients.

The novel, which begins with the murder of a much-disliked political science professor (with the unlikely name of Lola Dakota), also delves into the fascinating world of academia, where the infighting is no-holds-barred. The three previous entries in this series have provided Fairstein with a broad fan base, thanks to her fluid storytelling style, her insider’s knowledge and, particularly, her success in building the charming professional and (platonic) personal relationship between Alex and her investigator, Mike Chapman.

“Deadhouse” delivers, in addition to these delights, an extraordinarily well-knit mystery that the author wraps tightly in suspense before unfolding it with a flourish in the grim confines of the abandoned hospice. In the series’ debut novel, “Final Jeopardy,” Fairstein made good use of Alex and Mike’s fondness for the Alex Trebek-hosted TV show. Even if she hadn’t been clever enough to figure out another inventive way to incorporate that penchant for “Jeopardy” into the conclusion of “Deadhouse,” the crime novel would easily make my list as one of the best of the year.

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Dick Lochte, the author of “Lucky Dog and Other Tales of Murder” (Five Star) and the prize-winning novel “Sleeping Dog” (Poisoned Pen Press), reviews mysteries every other week.