Amid Twists and Turns, Love Blooms

Lee Child’s “Without Fear” (Putnam, $24.95, 374 pages) provides more than a fair share of action and adventure, assuming one can put reality on hold and accept its starting point. That’s the highly unlikely idea that the Secret Service would hire a freelance trouble-shooter to try to penetrate the security surrounding the vice president of the United States.

Since his first novel, “Killing Floor,” Child has been chronicling the adventures of Jack Reacher, a hard-case ex-military cop with a penchant for changing locations and maintaining a low profile that borders on the paranoid. Each book has required something or someone to force him to stop and smell the roses and the cordite.

None of the plot-establishing devices has been as effective as the one in “Killing Floor,” but “Fear” has other appealing elements to qualify as a close runner-up to that striking debut book.

Prime among them is his associate in mayhem, Frances Neagley, a woman as self-reliant and lethally effective as he. The interaction between the two--heavily professional here, but with a hint of something more personal to come--gives Reacher a bit more dimension. Child provides a full-out love interest for him, too, a romance cleverly complicated by the woman’s previous relationship with his late brother.

Though he spends more time than usual on his hero’s emotional side, the author has not stinted in the suspenseful twists and turns that fans have come to expect. The Secret Service’s real reason for hiring Reacher turns out to be a genuine threat on the veep’s life. The villains are clever and ruthless. The puzzling elements are provocative. Who are these seemingly invincible assassins? How do they gain access to the corridors of power? And why in the world would they want to bump off a vice president instead of the big guy? All questions are answered with the maximum amount of derring-do. And there’s a terrific snowbound finale that gives new meaning to the word “catharsis.”

Pop Thriller Divulges

Too Much Information

Since Linda Howard is the author of nine bestsellers in a row, I doubt she’ll care much that I had a problem with her newest, “Dying to Please” (Ballantine, $25.95, 312 pages). The Birmingham, Ala., location was a good idea. It’s virgin thriller country. Her protagonist’s vocation is another plus: the butlers we see in mysteries usually aren’t beautiful women who also serve as bodyguards. Sarah Stevens is, in fact, a unique creation--a former military brat turned expert marksman, skilled in hand-to-hand combat and fastidious in the preparation of breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as a whiz at doing the laundry. Howard introduces her in combat action, foiling a home invasion. It’s a well-developed sequence, but I did get a little restless with Stevens’ smug summation of the way she acquitted herself, then seeing the same point made by a variety of other characters, including the potential love interest, a homicide cop who’s having trust problems after being betrayed by his sluttish ex-wife.

Stevens’ handling of the home invaders is so heralded it makes it to TV where her toothsome beauty, poise and presence are noted by a 60-something gazillionaire whose fortress castle sits on an eight-acre estate in an exclusive section of the city. He is, of course, the villain of the piece, a stalker as twisted as a pretzel, who is perfectly willing to kill an unending array of Stevens’ employers just to have her for his very own. This is all pretty acceptable as pop thrillers go. But then we come to several sections of the book devoted to Stevens’ menstrual cycle.

Now, I know the trend is to make suspense protagonists more human, but isn’t it possible that readers may be given too much information? I’m not sure I want to know how that second cup of coffee effects Harry Bosch every morning, or if Kay Scarpetta suffers from a sinus condition. Some things should be left a mystery.

Revisiting the Familiar

Darkness of the Old South

The possibly pseudonymous Kenneth Abel (all the book jacket discloses is that he lives in Ohio) introduced New Orleans lawyer Danny Chaisson two years ago in “Cold Steel Rain,” a remarkable novel of murder and political chicanery set in the Louisiana swamplands. Its razor-sharp plot and lyrical descriptive passages suggested that Abel was falling in line right behind that other bard of the bayou, James Lee Burke. The book’s fascination stemmed from the mystery surrounding its protagonist. Was Chaisson just a bagman for a bent politician, a burnout case on a downward spiral, or was there something else going on behind his passive exterior? “Rain” provided the answer in a way that was satisfying and complete.

In “The Burying Field” (Putnam, $26.95, 291 pages), Abel brings the character back, which wasn’t exactly a wonderful idea. Unlike most current series protagonists, Chaisson hasn’t any secrets left. All his author can do is put him through a different set of the same problems, mainly those in which the dark traditions of the Old South continue to vie with human-rights progress in the here and now.

In “Field,” he’s sent by a powerful New Orleans real-estate developer to a sleepy bayou burg where the discovery of an undocumented slave cemetery has called a halt to a proposed shopping center. The Crescent City Donald Trump has given up hope of completing his project, but he’s concerned that the beating of an elderly black man by vandals on the property may expose him to a lawsuit. Chaisson arrives with a pal, a dangerous bar owner who also has lost the mystery he possessed in the first novel. Here he’s just the latest in a long line of sidekicks whose main task is to unnerve the ungodly. As he and Chaisson begin to investigate the beating, an assortment of stock characters emerge: the taunting, muscle-bound punks, the homicidal Klan man, the ineffectual sheriff and noble but downtrodden black folks. Abel’s prose is rich and his dialogue sharp, but with material this familiar, it doesn’t help much.

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