Dripping in blood, history and horticulture

“Q is for Quarry,” Sue Grafton’s 17th Santa Teresa caper, begins at Grayson Quarry beside Highway 1 near Lompoc, just north of Santa Teresa, where the corpse of an unknown girl is found in the summer of 1969. The Jane Doe and her killer remain unidentified and the mystery unsolved until a lifetime later when the two police detectives who failed to crack the case get back on the trail. They are both retired and afflicted with the ills of age; reopening the case provides an interest.

To do their legwork, they bring in our old acquaintance and theirs, Kinsey Milhone P.I., who is only too glad for field work that will get her away from the record searches and other routines with which she earns her keep. Interrupted only by doctors’ appointments and hospital stays, punctuated by drinking and smoking sessions that Kinsey deplores, the sinuous search on which the three embark takes them up and down the Central Coast, inland to the desert near the California-Arizona line, into the thickets of small town intimacies and the meanderings of family histories.

As pages turn, the details get more detailed, sentiments more sentimental (although to Kinsey, bless her, most children look interchangeable), solipsisms more solipsistic and provincialism more stubbornly provincial. The drizzle of detail decelerates the action. The story opens slowly, ambles on, then gathers momentum. The process of discovery is not reasoned through but eased out of red herrings and false trails, conjectured and worked out as Kinsey presses on until her and her friends’ quarry has been run to ground. This is not one of Grafton’s finest, which means that it’s still better than many mysteries and well worth the read.

In Stuart Woods’ “Blood Orchid,” on the other hand, everything moves fast. We get no soul-searching, little sentiment, lots of action with little to stand in its way, lots of complications and temptations for the reader to guess what’s going on. Holly Barker is chief of police in a small Florida town, Orchid Beach, where a prime oceanfront property that the government confiscated from a drug-running cartel has just been sold to a developer named Ed Shine. An orchid fancier, Shine narrowly escapes being shot while he shows off his latest creation, the Blood Orchid, to Holly and her father. And the inquiry into the shooting escalates when it turns out that two other developers bidding for the property have been more successfully bumped off. The plot thickens as the FBI enters the probe, and Holly’s life becomes pleasantly complicated as Shine seems to court her and as an FBI agent pursues her rather than more criminal quarries.

Commerce and criminality intermesh, as we expect these days, only more murderously. The zoo of bad guys expands, assassins thrive, casualties mount and Holly’s own security wilts as the Miami mob enters the fray. But perps or mobs or FBI, for Holly they’re much the same: trespassers on her turf. This is a war that she has to win, and win it she does. The mettlesome woman and her swain triumph even more amply than we anticipate. So here are all the spills, chills, thrills and transports that we expect from a master of the genre.

Jonathan Kellerman’s velocious “The Murder Book” opens with Dr. Alex Delaware recovering from a discouraging break with his beloved Robin. He misses her and he really misses the dog she took with her. Then he gets a heavy package in the mail: a handsome three-ring binder full of police photographs of heinous crimes, 43 of them.

Cut to his trusty sidekick, L.A. Homicide Det. Milo Sturgis, who recognizes the last snapshot of inert remains as a stale case that had been left unsolved. Flashback to the dull old days when expletives were not deleted and Milo was a rookie cop partnered with a bitter homophobe old hand called Schwinn. Together they had picked up the call to a young woman’s corpse, scalped, burned and sexually assaulted, dumped in a ditch near a freeway ramp; and they had failed to clear her murder. Twenty years later, Schwinn is dead, the tortured girl forgotten, but Milo and Alex reopen the case.

Their involuted search uncovers cover-ups long past and their roots in youthful and adult sleaze. Flurries of turpitude eruct: fat cat huckster families, their no-goodnik offspring, political vultures gobbling at the trough, sex, dope, orgies, gang bangs, indiscretions upgraded to mayhem, then swept under the mat. The edgy quest turns up armies of suspects, or at least platoons: a bloody snarl of rogue cops, pols on the take, sadists, rapists and arrogant rich scum. Powerful people work to discourage the investigation, unknown allies seek to urge them on, Robin remains elusive. But the scum responsible for the victim’s horrid end meet horrid ends themselves in a satisfying scoundrel-dammerung that leaves Southern California strewn with corpses. They sure had it coming.

As Andrew Vachss’ “Only Child” opens, his antihero, Burke, has been on the run for years. Now he returns to New York City and has to make a living. He is recruited by two Mafia barons to riddle out the culprit and the motive for the horrific murder of a 16-year-old Long Island girl. His investigation carries him deep into teenage culture, Internet effervescence, furtive filmmaking and kinky sex. It turns up a lot of joyless lore about freaks, how they work and how they work out their freakishness.

With Vachss, atmosphere is all, and the atmosphere here is grungy and ominous, the wardrobe lurches between louche sloppiness and plain uglification, weather is sullen, light bleary, mood murky, settings sullied and action ruthlessly blunt. Vachss’ style is personal, laconic, shaded and, of course, creepy. If you like hard-boiled punk narrative, this is a read for you.