FIRST FICTION

LONDON BRIDGES, by Jane Stevenson, Houghton Mifflin: 294 pp., $24

Put up a nice strong pot of Typhoo and get comfy. “London Bridges,” the first novel from Jane Stevenson, a comp lit professor at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland whose story collection, “Several Deceptions,” was well-received, is the kind of book that would make a perfect “Mystery” miniseries. But don’t wait for that eventuality to indulge your inner Anglophilia. “London Bridges” is “White Teeth” as it might have been written by Agatha Christie or A.S. Byatt or Evelyn Waugh: It has real suspense, old-fashioned, vaguely academic literary ambition and a devilish way of dealing with those time-worn English preoccupations of manners and class. It also has a cast as outre as anything out of Shakespeare.

There’s Sebastian Raphael, the dashing, gay professor of classics; Edward Lupset, the conniving, Tory solicitor; Dilip Dhesi, Edward’s earnest Sri Lankan co-worker and nemesis; Jeanene, the wide-eyed young Aussie pharmacist and classics student; Hattie, the vertiginously tall churchgoing English rose; Mr. Eugenides, an aged Greek who lives in an imposing, mysterious residence in the heart of the city; Lamprini, an imposing, mysterious Greek woman clearly up to no good; and, finally, Akakios, a Greek Orthodox potentate who seems to have stepped into the modern world directly from Byzantium.

The tenuous bridges that connect these characters are what nudge along this story of forgotten treasures buried in safety deposit boxes or hidden in plain sight along the Thames and of why someone like Edward would dump deadly poison into Mr. Eugenides’ liver salts. These bridges also tell an affectionate tale of London itself, how the city fosters unlikely couplings and equally unlikely conspiracies.

PERSONAL VELOCITY, By Rebecca Miller, Grove Press: 174 pp., $23

Rebecca Miller’s debut story collection is a series of eye-opening portraits of women who are either struggling to attain self-knowledge or who are hopelessly plagued by it. We find Julianne--semi-happily married to an older, big-deal writer--inspecting herself in the mirror, noting that she’s “withering, like a peach left too long in the fridge.” There’s Louisa, whose mother is a folk artist famous for her garish ceramic ashtrays, forever brooding about her long-lost twin, a taunting symbol of her unreachable self. Delia is the self-proclaimed school slut; she grows up to be an abused wife who can only get her groove back by reverting to the compulsive behavior that made her life a mess in the first place. And Greta, a mid-level cookbook editor, oscillates between denial, decision and fantasy when a job promotion gets her thinking about ditching her nice-guy fact-checker husband.

Miller’s prose is alarmingly unvarnished, as if she’s hovering above these questions of identity and desire with transcendent impartiality. Maybe it’s because she refuses to resolve the little crises of the soul that generate the nagging questions within us all: Who am I? Is who I am really what I want or ought to be? Or is who I think I can be really who I am? Miller might pretend to be detached and objective as she probes these quandaries, but she’s always humane, always honest and always entertaining.

THE ORDINARY WHITE BOY, by Brock Clarke, Harcourt: 272 pp., $24

The “ordinary white boy” of this novel--an examination of small-town American life that attempts to be as scathing as it is sympathetic--is one Lamar Kerry Jr. He’s 27, underachieving and a resident of a boring upstate New York community called Little Falls. He’s the kind of guy who favors flannel shirts, learned to drink beer really well in college and who, for all his lack of direction, tends to contemplate the big issues the way other guys contemplate “Monday Night Football.”

The big issue of the moment is the disappearance--and possible murder--of Mark Ramirez, Little Falls’ lone Puerto Rican citizen. As a part-time, half-hearted reporter on his dad’s newspaper, Lamar is drawn into the Ramirez case. At last, a little excitement: a whiff of hate crime, a chance to rise above apathy, an opportunity to expose all the pernicious givens of life in Little Falls. Lamar, of course, pursues the Ramirez case with characteristic sloth, getting continually distracted by his wheelchair-dependent mom, by his on-again, off-again girlfriend, by the seductive charms of one of his cousins and by an urge to get himself beaten up in redneck bars.

In this nonstory of upstate soul-searching, Brock Clarke has a way of passive-aggressively frustrating expectations at every turn: The message here is that life isn’t as interesting as you think, or, as Lamar puts it (with a turn of phrase that can also be applied to this book): “plenty will happen, but none of it will be particularly surprising.”