Suspenseful Cops-and-Robbers Saga With a Tinge of Hollywood

Stephen J. Cannell’s “The Viking Funeral” (St. Martin’s, $24.95, 400 pages) is the sort of fast and furious read you might expect from one of television’s most successful and inventive writer-producers. It’s the second book in the continuing saga of Shane Scully, an LAPD detective so at odds with the system that he gets even less respect than Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch.

Still rocky from the physical and mental pummeling he suffered in “The Tin Collectors,” Scully takes a spin along the Ventura Freeway and spies a familiar face one lane over. It belongs to Jody Dean, who was his closest friend “from Little League through the Police Academy.” The unusual aspect of this sighting is that Dean supposedly died by his own hand two years ago. Naturally, no one believes Scully.

His persistent search for proof of his pal’s resurrection widens this credibility gap, alienates him further from the force and, when he starts to uncover the secret behind Jody’s “suicide,” places him and his loved ones in peril.

In creating such TV series as “Ten Speed and Brown Shoe” and “The A-Team,” Cannell seemed to delight in turning pop fiction concepts on their ear. Here, consciously or not, he samples bits and pieces from a variety of successful mysteries and thrillers--ranging from Agatha Christie’s “What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!” to Graham Greene’s “The Third Man”--and uses them to fashion an effective action-adventure tale built around male bonding and a mind-boggling scam involving rogue policemen, drug-laundering and tobacco company skulduggery, the last, he says, based on fact.

Given that, the author lets his imagination roam free in concocting an assortment of unique cops and robbers, as well as original suspenseful situations. The one minor annoyance may be a reaction to all those years of scriptwriting, an overuse of something not allowed by his former gig--passages devoted to his hero’s thought processes. As Hemingway and Hammett, among others, have proven, when the dialogue is good and the action flowing fast, a lot of mental meandering merely gets in the way.

If you think you’ve got troubles, check out Joanne Kuhlman, the protagonist of Nancy Taylor Rosenberg’s new novel, “Conflict of Interest” (Hyperion, $24.95, 312 pages). The Ventura County prosecutor’s soon-to-be ex-husband, a computer wiz in jail for embezzling and for absconding with their two children, may have hired someone to kill her. Their son and older daughter, now living with her after a long separation, are not happy kids. The boy feels abandoned, the 15-year-old girl, who is pregnant, is loyal to her father.

On top of that, our heroine thinks that one of the three young men she’s trying for armed robbery may be the innocent dupe of the others. She’s also beginning to fall in love with the dupe’s defense attorney. This may sound as if Rosenberg has gone a bit over the top in piling on the grief, but, actually, the book, unlike a couple of her other novels, is pretty effective.

Prosecutor Kuhlman is a likable, humane protagonist. There’s an unusual guardian angel watching over her, an enigmatic unlicensed but effective bodyguard named Eli. The main villains in the piece, two brothers as devious as they are sociopathic, are frighteningly real. And the domestic situations have the ring of truth. The author keeps the action moving from Joanne to the evil brothers and their naive co-defendant to the resourceful Eli--none of whom behaves in any predictable way, which makes for fascinating reading.

Hard-boiled heroine Nina Zero was headed for prison at the fade-out of her last caper, Robert M. Eversz’s “Shooting Elvis” (1996). Among other things, she’d unwittingly been responsible for blowing up a large part of LAX. She’s at large and almost in charge in the author’s new “Killing Paparazzi” (St. Martin’s Minotaur, $23.95, 310 pages). Tougher than beef jerky and considerably more cynical and wary than when she entered stir, Nina is quick to accept $2,000 for marrying a British photographer in need of a green card. They part on less than friendly terms, but when he becomes victim No. 3 in a series of paparazzi murders, she, by then a member of the shutterbug trade herself, decides to hunt down the killer.

All the standard thriller elements are present, but Eversz’s sardonic style and contemporary noir attitude transform them into fresh and flippant entertainment. “Killing,” like its predecessor, is a street-smart, razor-sharp combination of crime fiction and Southern California social commentary.

Here’s narrator Nina on vanity billboards and the power of celebrity: “Further down Sunset, Madonna strained against her plywood frame with breasts big enough to crush small cars, Nathan Lane mugged with a mouse the size of a killer whale and the 30-foot-tall sunglassed face of Jack Nicholson howled at the moon. One Halloween or Oscar night they might come alive, leap free of the plywood, paint and paper that bound them, and with bodies to match the size of their stardom trample Hollywood to dust.”

Dick Lochte, the author of the prize-winning novel “Sleeping Dog” and its sequel, “Laughing Dog” (Poisoned Pen Press), reviews mysteries every other Wednesday.