L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

In the tawdry barrens where would-be thrillers lurk, Robert K. Tannenbaum’s novels stand out as oases in a desolate waste: vivid, witty, unflagging and zestful. “Absolute Rage” is one more of the same, and it’s a champion.

The Majestic Coal Corp. holds Robbens County, W.Va., in thrall. It has the miners union in its pocket along with the mayor, judge, police and assorted mandarins of McCullensburg, the county seat. Then a reforming labor leader, Red Heeney, a bigmouthed Irish upstart, gets murdered for his pains along with his wife and his young daughter. Not an unusual occurrence in those parts, and all would be supine again in the most corrupt county in the state if Rose Heeney had not been a friend of Marlene Ciompi.

A semiretired Sicilian desperada, Marlene decides to avenge dead friends. She has long resented cruel, malevolent people getting away with murder all around, has wanted to stop them, has wanted to kill them, has demonstrated that she’s good at it. But she can’t live that way, now that she’s become the mother of three lovely children, all legal offspring of Butch Karp, the chief assistant district attorney for New York County. So she has turned into the good mom of a nicely loony household and a businesswoman who raises, trains and sells large dogs on a Long Island farm.

Rose Heeney’s death brings Marlene and her slavering mastiff to McCullensburg, where she joins forces with the Heeneys’ two surviving sons, dries out a drunken local lawyer and stirs up a barrel full of vicious local snakes. Her husband follows her. Karp is weary of Manhattan deskwork, bored with the genteelly corrupt bureaucracy that keeps him in a safe, respectable, tedious job “supervising the installation of impoverished morons in state penal institutions.”

He jumps at the invitation of West Virginia’s governor to become a special prosecutor and bring justice to a corrupt town. Nor does he disdain underhanded tactics if they help to nail the brutal thugs he faces there.

Because Robbens County runs by its own rules and these disdain the ruly, alarms, excursions and slaughter are rife. But neither Butch nor Marlene will triumph by relying on law enforcement.

The thugs are impregnable on a mountaintop above a maze of tunnels. They will be terminated with extreme prejudice by the intervention of Marlene’s gangster friends, more vicious than the locals and more efficient too.

The Heeneys are revenged in spades, though this plays havoc with Butch’s ethics and distresses the Karps’ daughter who, as a believing Catholic, leaves the extermination of the unrighteous to God. So we leave the family a bit battered but hoping to meet them again soon. The blurb declares Tannenbaum addictive and, for once, the blurb is right.

Suspend disbelief ye who pick up Philip Rosenberg’s “House of Lords.” If you do, you’re in for a treat. Jeffrey Blaine, a successful, youngish New York investment banker, is ambushed by gangsters who want him to launder their ill-gotten gains. The gangsters get more than they bargained for, so does Blaine and so do Rosenberg’s readers, who are offered a breathless switchback ride as well as a crash course on links between investment banking and organized crime or more disorganized but no less fraudulent enterprises.

Blaine has a good time running rings around federal authorities and asserting money-spinning superiority over (other) crooks. His daughter, Jessica, is another kettle of catfish. Beautiful, addle-pated and spoiled rotten, the 18-year-old is out of control: a fount of shallow self-indulgence cast as self-affirmation. She lives on impulse in a world where every impulse seems licit, learns to do drugs and to get beaten up by her gangster boyfriend, then gets raped by the gangster boss who uses her mother and works with her father.

There’s lots of affluent phoniness and much menace; volatile relationships abound, and so does ill-focused police work. You can hear the pelf slosh around. Wheels churn within wheels, and cogs bite on cogs bedeviling business relations, subverting marriages whose chains turn out so heavy that they take three to bear. And the language these people use!

In the end, some players are benched and some are buried, but nobody really wins anything beside money (which is nothing to sneeze at) except the reader who has been sped through lucid, convoluted and relentless rapids of action. My only cavil is that if you’re going to make sophisticated references, you’d better get them right. The Paris restaurant mentioned on Page 15 should be L’Archestrate, and its chef was Alain Senderens.

Crime yarns have sprouted one more subgenre: the ethnic detective--Asian, Black, Latino, Native American or Jewish. Pending a rattling good yarn about Sikh shenanigans or Muslim mayhem, Orthodox Jews will have to do, and Faye Kellerman’s “Stone Kiss” serves them up dripping with multicultural color.

But, even when seasoned with a lot of gore, the exotic fare can’t turn a stodgy story into a savory snack. The basic premise--that an L.A. police lieutenant would drop everything and dash off to New York because the relative of a relative has been murdered and another is missing--is unconvincing to start with. Then, his failure to abandon the unwelcoming clan that invoked his aid is the most mystifying part of the mystery.

As it stands, Decker’s family jihad begins and ends in blood. Its twists and turns involve weird, illegal activities, an old foe turned uncertain confederate, and ethnic protagonists of all ages, genders and sects, most of them unattractive. The action is frenetic, the local color is underwhelming and the climax is climactic, but it doesn’t come soon enough.