L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

It’s a few days before Christmas, five lions are chewing on a naked woman in the city zoo, and TV reporters are having a field day. The zoo lies half in the 87th precinct and half in the 88th. So officers Carella and Meyer of the 87th and Ollie Weeks of the 88th catch the squeal, and we are entrapped by the spell of Ed McBain in the guise of the Magical Mr. Mistoffelees.

Redheads are ice-picked to death and fed to the lions. Guys are cold-cocked and stuffed in garbage cans with bullets in the back of the head. Twenty billion dollars in counterfeit bills float around the big bad world; enough of the phonies, so good that no one can tell them from the real thing, surface in the big bad city. Lowlifes snort controlled substances; others deal them and pay off the cops, which enhances faith in the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, burglaries go down and blood is shed; drug deals turn into misdeals; money is marked, dirty, menacing; secret service agents, terrorists, murderous blonds and bankers skitter and dodge around while the police go about their business.

As Carella and Fat Ollie work their way through the maze of God-knows-what criminal activities, we’re plied with information about the wedges of pizza dripping with sauce and cheese, the majestic sandwiches, the fig newtons and the beers that Ollie ingests in industrial quantities; about the economics of the dope trade, drug smuggling and counterfeit money; and about Carella’s equally intricate family affairs. It turns out that the hub of the action is in a book publishing firm: an intriguing aspect of enterprises whose murderous activities are more often reserved for print. And the bookmen’s felonious operations have been generated, maybe, by the CIA.

We shall never know. But nothing lies beyond McBain’s ingeniousness. Cool, crisp and blood-soaked, drenched in drugs and dough almost as deep as Wall Street, “Money, Money, Money” makes the world go ‘round more velociously.

Sara Paretsky’s Virginia Iphigenia Warshawski is always politically correct. But in “Total Recall” she is in overdrive. There are Jews demanding passage of the Illinois Holocaust Asset Recovery Act; there are blacks demanding restitution for the descendants of slaves; there are survivors of the Holocaust and nuts who think that they too went through it; and others who make hay on the mediagenic aspects of it all. There are little girls who are a joy or a pain in the neck, depending on how you look upon them; fanatics with followings and bullhorns and crazy agendas; hoods and boys from the ‘hood; and police so unobtrusive that they might as well not be there.

And there is Warshawski, mettlesome as always and twice as irrepressible, her feelings on the boil, her sensibilities getting the better of her sense, always on the run, tearing her pantyhose, draggling her blouses, letting her cell phone run down even while short of change for the pay phones she resorts to.

It all starts with a life insurance policy that is supposed to pay for a funeral but has been fraudulently cashed years before; and with a large insurance company that issued the policy: Ajax, now bought by an even larger Swiss concern, Edelweiss. It goes on with a pestering lunatic who thinks he is related to some of Warshawski’s friends and with a pretentious hypnotherapist dedicated to confirming the lunatic’s delusions.

Survivors of Nazi terror, martyrs of Nazi camps and their heirs confront a corrupt insurance industry bent on covering its traces. Victims, mostly dead, fall like autumn leaves; so do reputations of big-time executives involved in sinister machinations. But the entwining thread of the hugger-mugger lies in the repressed memories of those who survived trauma, and in particular in the mind of Vic’s dearest friend, the Austrian-born surgeon Letty Hershel. Letty’s painful past and her present pathos hover, intrigue, intrude and finally explain her inexplicable conduct.

If you think this sounds convoluted, you’re right. Vic’s fans will love it. Others may find the compassion cloying. A surfeit of empathy can make for soppy reading.

In C.J. Box’s “Open Season,” Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett is saddled with a grumbly pregnant wife, an intermittent mother-in-law, two small daughters who are simply adorable and the reputation of a ninny. Then one guy dies mysteriously beside Joe’s woodpile, three hunters are shot at Crazy Woman Creek and another is snuffed out by a fellow warden who wants to be sheriff. Joe is offered a much better job with InterWest Resources, which wants to build a natural gas pipeline across the Saddlestring Mountains, guaranteed to bring jobs and prosperity to remote Twelve Sleep County. But more losers keep dropping, and trouble engulfs Joe, putting his job in jeopardy and his family in danger. The violence is muted, excitement mitigated, developments predictable; but the writing is crisp, the mountainscapes are great, and Joe, a fine wing shot, proves himself in the end.

What makes “Open Season” worth reading, however, is Box’s tragicomic presentation of ecological politics, environmental impact maneuvers and federal and state easement chicanery that call for more lawyers than they do pipe-fitters. When it turns out that the rare and obscure Miller’s weasel has been sighted in the area, all the activities that kept Saddlestring village going are suddenly restricted. Biologists, journalists, environmentalists, network satellite trucks, agents of the Environmental Protection Agency and agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service move in.

Local families drop their house keys at the bank as they move out, because jobs in lumber, grazing, agriculture and recreation evaporate. The InterWest pipeline is capped and abandoned 50 miles west of the Bighorn Mountains.

But television viewers can delight in footage of Miller’s weasels standing upright and chirping, and friends of nature can sleep easy: The weasel ecosystem rests in good hands.