Tough, resourceful and flip

Breaking news: Robert B. Parker is back in full form. Spenser, Susan and Hawk have recovered wits and wit. Wisecracks snap, pop, crackle all the way. Flippancy flips as bullets fly. Even Pearl, the Wonder Dog, reappears as Pearl II and turns out as meddling, affectionate and endearing as her predecessor. “Back Story” wends and jerks its switchback way through geological layers of back stories, deceptions and lies evoked by an actress’ wish to see more clearly into her own past, into who killed her mother and why: a bad idea that sets off mines in the present. But it is the book’s genial mood, saucy tone and ripping action that discourage all attempts to put it down.

James Swain is “the best new writer I have come across in a long, long time,” Michael Connelly once said, and Connelly is right. Swain is on his third mystery, and Connelly’s still right. Ex-cop Tony Valentine, a tough detective with a sharp eye and a jagged chip on his shoulder, still earns his living exposing hustlers who rig games and cheat gaming houses, many of the cheats being casino employees. This time we’re in Florida: a summer storm of hoaxes, casinos, everglades, alligators, scams by the swarmful, suckers by the score, clutters of con men and an avalanche of breathless action, set mostly in Miami -- where driving half a mile takes 10 minutes and a gallon of gas, a shrimp cocktail can run 20 bucks before tax and tip and grifters are as thick on the ground as sun-baked retirees.

A blackjack dealer who rigged a game and dealt one player 64 winning hands in a row has scampered, probably into a gator’s gut. Looking for him, Tony almost becomes alligator food himself. He survives, as heroes must, and goes on to other and more giddy adventures, uncovering enough chicaneries, hornswoggles, legerdemain and juggleries to leave one panting. How long will Swain keep up this triumphant march? No matter. “Sucker Bet” will keep the suckers up long enough to see how it turns out this time.

“The Last Detective” is one more Robert Crais elegy for Los Angeles. Here, Elvis Cole, who fought in Vietnam, was wounded there and decorated (but has gone through other incarnations since), thought he had left the past behind. Now it catches up with him in the most maddening way when Ben Chenier, son of his lover, Lucy, is kidnapped by thugs who claim that this is payback for things that Elvis knows he never did.

The search for Ben carries Elvis and his taciturn sidekick Pike through thickets of villains, beginning with Ben’s rich, cross-grained father, Richard Chenier, and continuing with a still grimmer gang of murderous child snatchers. It’s all very nerve-racking and gory; the culminating bloodbath is a blundering mess. But, though Cole and Pike prove as crafty as ever, the one is off his stroke, the other physically diminished. Worse still, Elvis has lost the humor that had been Crais’ tribute to Parker’s Spenser. So, whilst it moves rapidly and provocatively, this raging “Last Detective” conveys an acrid taste.

“Soul Circus” serves up what George Pelecanos’ fans have come to expect and, once again, the effect is sharp and satisfying: a richly textured tapestry, a quirky plot, a large, multicolored cast of lawbreakers, law enforcers, misfits, malfeasants and innocent bystanders. The venue, as always, is Washington, D.C., and alentours. So is the message: Racism is rank, the death penalty wrong, vicious brutes are victims too, above all save the young. However debatable one or two of the propositions, talent and trust cajole suspension of judgment. Derek Strange, P.I., works for a local law firm. Through neighborhoods where crickets chirp on summer nights but where you’re more likely to get yourself capped than in others, he pursues witnesses for the trial of a gang lord, hoping for evidence that would spare the client’s life. Strange’s stamping ground teems with gangs and gun dealers who sell cheap guns to project kids and better pieces to more advanced entrepreneurs.

Strange lays his life on the line for a living but also because he wants to save the world or, at least, a few of the kids with no fathers, no education and no exit except prison or death. He succeeds (modestly) because he’s unrelentingly professional, honorable and decent. Witnesses and associates die, and so do the criminals, mostly by mutual massacre. But Strange’s family thrives and he survives to empathize another day. The novels of Pelecanos are passionate, vital and vigorously demotic. They are also first-rate social history. If they have sense, historians to come will plumb them for evidence of how men and women lived, feared and coped in the war zones of everyday life: not only when they preyed on each other but when they talked, loved, listened to music or just wasted time.