Piano-Playing Hero Probes Death of Jazz Musician

In 1988, charismatic jazz musician Chet Baker, by then suffering from the dissipation of drug addiction, fell to his death from the window of a hotel in Amsterdam. The fall was officially declared an accident. But the lack of a witness led to the inevitable rumors that he’d jumped or even that he’d been pushed. In “Looking for Chet Baker” (Walker, $24.95, 254 pages), the fifth Evan Horne mystery, professional drummer and music critic Bill Moody sends his fictional piano-playing hero on a quest to find the truth about Baker’s death.

When an old pal, Professor Charles “Ace” Buffington, asks Horne to help with his research on Baker, the pianist refuses. Such sleuthing (most recently in the mystery “Bird Lives!”) has left him emotionally rocky and peevish about his reputation as a musician being superceded by his fame as a detective. But when he arrives for a club date in Amsterdam, he discovers that Buffington, who’d been digging into Baker’s death, has gone missing, apparently a victim of foul play.

The book hits all the right notes as it swings from Horne’s reluctant investigation to his settling into the city’s jazz scene. Moody shrewdly mixes suspense with smartly rendered conversation about Baker’s life, jazzmen in general (Billy Strayhorn was only 16 when he wrote “Lush Life,” an expatriate tenor man notes), classic recordings, the blues versus Broadway happy tunes and, inevitably, drugs. Horne narrates the proceedings in the present tense, a device that can be unwieldy but, used properly, as it is here, it adds a sense of immediacy that draws us closer. The book has the potential for turning mystery lovers into jazz fans. And vice versa.

Crime-Solving and

Canines Go Together

“The Wicked Flea” (Berkley, $21.95, 304 pages) is not merely author Susan Conant’s latest canine-fancier reply to Lillian Jackson Braun’s popular “Cat Who ...” series. It is a fiction that delights in dogs, abounds in dogs, revels in dogs.

Most mystery dog tales feature owner and pet as a sort of sleuthing team that venture into the ordinary world as we know it. An example is Carol Lea Benjamin’s surprisingly gritty “The Long Good Boy” (Walker) in which private detective Rachel Alexander is accompanied by her pit bull, Dash, as she investigates the murder of a transsexual prostitute in Manhattan. “Flea,” a cozy mystery set in Cambridge, rarely departs from the dog park and when it does, its focus remains so steadfastly on mankind’s best friends that the murder of an unpleasant, insensitive dog owner and the subsequent search for the killer seem almost beside the point.

As far as the book’s narrator and amateur sleuth, Holly Winter, is concerned, it’s a dog’s world. She’s the proud owner-trainer of two well-behaved Alaskan malamutes. She writes a column in Dog’s Life magazine and is assembling a canine cookbook titled “A Hundred and One Ways to Cook Liver.” A landlady, she won’t rent to anyone who doesn’t have a pet. She uses phrases like “this undogly hour.” The love of her life is--what else?--a veterinarian.

But she let him slip away and his recent marriage has sent her to a therapist because she didn’t just lose a lover, she lost an excellent health-care source for her malamutes. When the owner of an undisciplined golden retriever is found murdered in the park, Holly and her dogs are drawn into the investigation, but she doesn’t let that stop her from Kennel Club chat or breeder facts and figures.

Conant has populated the novel with an interesting cast of humans and animals, particularly the victim’s ghastly family. And there’s a fair amount of humor. But the real appeal here is for those readers looking for a novel with, to coin a Holly-like phrase, dog in the details.

Eve Dallas Is Back

to the Near Future

Romance novelist Nora Roberts uses the pen name J.D. Robb for her mass market paperbacks featuring Eve Dallas, a hard-boiled NYPD detective. Dallas searches for truth and justice in the near future, when a cop has to deal not only with rapists and murderers but also with witches, demons and mystics. The current entry in the series, “Reunion in Death” (Berkley, $7.99, 384 pages), limits the New Age aspects to a secondary plot involving the visiting parents of Dallas’ efficient assistant, Peabody. Mom has the power to cloud minds; Dad is ultra-empathic.

The main story is played relatively straight and it’s worth a read. Julianna Dunne, a murderer Dallas sent to prison a decade ago, has been paroled. She wastes no time in starting to bump off men of influence in an attempt to draw Dallas into a game of homicidal cat-and-mouse in which the policewoman will lose everything she holds near and dear.

Roberts’ mixture of suspense and romance (Dallas is married to one of the wealthiest, most powerful, most sensitive, most loving and generous men in the known universe) is pretty potent. But she’s also provided her protagonist with an especially complex history and psychology that should fascinate readers not usually drawn to paperback originals.

Yes, the otherworldly trappings may strike the serious crime fiction fan as silly. But there are sections of the book--particularly one describing her visit to the Texas neighborhood of her youth where she relives the horrendous abuse and savagery of an early life with father--that more than compensate for the effort it takes to flip past the less-inspired parts.

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