Natural Beauty Contaminated by Death and Greed

There’s something delightfully perverse about the way Nevada Barr lovingly describes the sylvan beauty of our national parks and then introduces a cast of cruel and greedy humans to ugly things up. In “Hunting Season” (Putnam, $24.95, 322 pages), her 10th book about recently promoted District Park Ranger Anna Pigeon, she mars the forestry along Mississippi’s Natchez Trace with loutish redneck hunters, racists, sociopathic poachers, politicians and recalcitrant deputy rangers.

The main case on Anna’s docket is a suspicious death: The nude body of a local businessman has turned up at a resort accompanied by signs of a sadomasochistic ritual. The investigation takes up most of the book, with the potentially perilous aftermath of Anna’s unpleasant set-to with a bunch of macho hunters supplying the rest of the plot. There’s scarcely room left for such personal matters as her involvement with a married man, a sheriff and an ordained Episcopal minister, to boot.

As has been the case with other entries in this popular series, the characters are well-drawn, the style smooth and eminently readable and the mystery credible if a bit too easily penetrable. The real puzzle, and one which Barr should address, is why her smart and sensible heroine continues to waltz into jeopardy as carelessly as a ninny. The author successfully concocts genuinely thrilling sequences in each book that rely on the element of surprise. (In her last novel, “Blood Lure,” there was a chilling bear attack. In “Season,” on a dark road, Anna’s vehicle is crushed by a truck from hell.) But for the reader to believe that so bright and observant a woman would allow herself to fall victim to a rather dull villain near novel’s end, a better rationalization is needed than the one found here.

*

Tragedy Unravels Deep

in the Heart of Florida

When James M. Hall is writing about Florida’s flora, fauna and fish, his prose is Hemingway clean and true. If evidence were needed, there are two riveting battles between out-classed humans and a powerful and wily marlin in his new “Blackwater Sound” (St. Martin’s Minotaur, $24.95, 339 pages). But as good a stylist as he is, for some reason his series work sticks closely to the chart the late John D. MacDonald created and wore to tatters--quirky Renaissance man pauses in his contemplation of Florida’s decline to assist emotionally wounded heroine in battle against psychotic villains.

Not that Hall doesn’t rev things up a little. Instead of MacDonald’s philosophic salvage consultant Travis McGee, we’re presented with the moodier, edgier but equally opinionated fisherman Thorne. He’s aboard his boat, mulling over the pollution of the Florida Keys and the end of his current romance, when a passenger plane plummets into the drink. (A McGee adventure might have begun with a dead woman floating in the water, but one stiff barely catches anybody’s notice these days.)

Thorne’s suspicious nature and the arrival of a less derivative Hall protagonist, “Body Language’s” crime-scene photographer Alexandra Collins-Rafferty, whose Alzheimer’s-inflicted father has gone missing, set him off on the trail of possibly the most dysfunctional family to appear in modern literature. Also in the mix is a devastating death ray capable of destroying civilization as we know it.

MacDonald’s dark devices were more personal and consequently more frightening. A memorable one was a machine created to promote deep slumber that was turned into a devious murder weapon by the simple canceling of its wake-up device. But reminiscing about past mysteries is probably as futile as bemoaning the pollution of the Keys.

*

Down-to-Earth Murder, Corruption and Scandal

One of the last of the truly Philip Marlowe-like White Knight gumshoes, Loren D. Estleman’s Amos Walker is as independent, moody and wisecracking as Thorne, and in his newest tale, “Sinister Heights” (Mysterious Press, $24.95, 262 pages), he has as much to say about the decline of western civilization in general and his native territory (Detroit) in particular. “My bank, a 150-year-old Detroit concern, had recently taken down its sign and replaced it with one bearing a name more suited to its new conglomonational status,” he tells us. “Whether it had merged with, been bought by, or had bought a chain of similar institutions stretching from Key West to Point Barrow was a Chinese puzzler for its shareholders to figure out; its immediate concern to me was that all of its services had dried up like the ink in its ballpoint pens.”

Hired by the young widow of one of the town’s movers and shakers to locate the deceased’s illegitimate heirs, Walker is skeptical but game. The search involving three generations of the late industrialist’s discarded family includes murder, kidnapping, crooked cops, union politics and the death of a woman very close to the detective. There are no ray guns, S&M; sex sequences or poetic descriptions of eviscerations. Just characters and situations that seem Earthbound and, with the exception of Walker’s ability to take a licking and keep on ticking, credible. Given a choice of high concept or high professionalism, I’ll take the latter any time.

*

Anthology of Voices Old and New to Noir

One of the suspense genre’s more discerning editors, Michele Slung, has followed her popular collections, “I Shudder at Your Touch” and “Shudder Again,” with “Stranger: Dark Tales of Eerie Encounters” (Perennial, $13.95, 371 pages), 22 noir gems that shine like blood rubies. It’s not surprising to find Tabitha King or H.P. Lovecraft or Richard Matheson being represented. Nor do Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson seem to be in the wrong anthology. But it’s nice to be reminded that Edith Wharton, for all of “Ethan Frome,” “The Age of Innocence,” etc., was no slouch when it came to conjuring up chills.

*

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