Seamy, gruesome and grimy thrills

Summer is over, but crime, as one learns from Alafair Burke, is never ending. Menace lurks everywhere and at all times. Burke’s “Judgment Calls” serves up gobs of grubby violence, rape, sodomy, child prostitution and those who feed off them and those who try to staunch them.

Samantha Kinkaid, an assistant district attorney in the Portland Drug and Vice Division, is called in when a 13-year-old girl is snatched off the street, brutally assaulted and left for dead on the outskirts of town. The story turns into a legal procedural, unfolding not just the jurisprudence and unexpected contortions of what started out as a pretty straightforward case but also the courtroom maneuvers, judicial etiquette, pyrotechnics and simple slogging of litigation. As the case sprouts unexpected ramifications, the atmosphere grows chillier and Kinkaid finds herself increasingly isolated, struggling not just against toxic villains who treat young girls like backseat candy but also against bent superiors.

The book is pleasurably irritating, gripping at times and spurting to a suitably gory wipeout by the end, but it’s also a bit hobbled by an intermittently holier-than-thou heroine and her policeman boyfriend, who is troubled by the role of vengeance and discrimination in the war against pimps and blackguards. They might remember Shakespeare’s advice in “Henry V”: Stillness and humility are very well in peace, “But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the actions of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage.”

Of rage there is plenty in Jack Higgins’ “Bad Company,” a taut, absorbing thriller in which a German billionaire takes up the brutal Rashid feud (first described in Higgins’ “Midnight Runner”) against Brits and Yanks, while the action shifts to Central Europe and the British Isles. Nazi gold has survived to finance oil exploration in the Arabian desert, German arms deals and the further tattering of the peace process in Northern Ireland. But there’s worse to come.

Much-decorated Sturmbahnfuhrer Baron Max von Berger of the Waffen-SS was never a Nazi, but Hitler took a fancy to him. In his last days, he entrusted the young man with a personal diary holding the record of a 1945 meeting between a member of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “kitchen Cabinet” and a representative of the Fuhrer. The idea entertained was for the Germans and Americans to turn on Russia and save the world from communism. It never came to anything because our president wouldn’t buy it. But the son of Roosevelt’s representative is now U.S. president. The fictional fiasco doesn’t sound like a big deal, but Higgins expects the diary’s revelation to create a political crisis to be avoided at all costs.

To quash Berger’s evil scheme to reveal the diary, Higgins fields the same ruthless and hard-drinking team captained by ex-IRA enforcer Sean Dillon. The company is bad -- that is, deadly -- on both sides. But Sean’s side is our side, and it takes care of ugly quandaries that ordinary folk don’t know how to handle. Our chaps don’t play by the rules because they know the justice system doesn’t work, but they mean well while their dastardly opponents, led by the baron and his illegitimate son, a coldhearted killer, threaten to devastate democracy itself. The story culminates in a great shootout at the baron’s corral, where the good guys cover themselves with glory and the bad guys go down in flames. All’s well that ends well.

In Naomi Rand’s “Stealing for a Living,” an old doctor who runs an abortion clinic is murdered execution-style, her aide is shot dead, the clinic is bombed and further explosions target other abortion providers. Meanwhile a disgruntled black man has iced his Hasidic employers and, adding insult to injury, has cut off their side curls. The two plots interweave in counterpoint, and attempts to unravel their whys and wherefores do so too.

Rand enlivens and complicates the story with skeletons that pop in and out of cupboards and with digressions concerning women, race, prejudice, raising children, the death penalty and those who peddle it -- not to mention those who deserve it. Rand’s heroine, Emma Price, an investigator with the Capital Defenders’ Office, handles this as she handles the baby in her life -- as well as men and other adolescents -- with flair and frazzle. And the author turns Emma’s saga into a fast-paced whodunit that keeps the reader captive to the end.

Peter Lovesey’s splendid “The House Sitter” features British police procedures different from our own in mood and pace, along with interrogators who call suspects “love” and “ducky.” At bottom, though, things are not very different. The haves display their property, the have-nots strive to relieve them of it. Reflection has been replaced by high-tech intelligence, computers and samples of DNA. Information technology has taken over their working lives, and IT figures largely in Lovesey’s elegant and suspenseful puzzle.

A youngish attractive psychological offender profiler working for the British police is strangled on a beach of the South English coast. Det. Constable Henrietta Mallin of Bognor CID shares the investigation with Det. Supt. Peter Diamond of the Bath police, because Emma Tyson, the victim, lived in his bailiwick. The investigation gets tangled with the pursuit of a serial killer who has offed one film producer and threatens to rub out two disposable celebrities.

Tyson was profiling a mysterious assassin who likes to quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; perhaps that’s what got her killed. Following a slew of false leads, the police are run off their feet while the “Mariner” continues to elude them and gets his second victim, who had been stashed under police guard in a safe house. That’s when Diamond takes things in his own hands: In a breathless finale, he apprehends the repellent, self-admiring murderer, confirming the murdered Tyson’s preliminary assessments and his own reputation as an intuitive and unrelenting scrutinizer.

Christopher Reich’s electric latest, “The Devil’s Banker,” opens on a brace of apparently disparate doings that soon converge into a mosaic that makes only too much sense. The bad guys are moving wads of money about, preliminary to a really humongous outrage. The more-or-less good guys, blundering through accumulated acronyms and the crush of computers, try to follow the money, the explosives and the cyber-trails from Pakistan to Paris and beyond. Beginning with a bang in a Paris apartment, where a bomb blast rips apart several agents and the man they tracked, they drive from bank to bank, police station to police station, hotel to hotel and ATM to ATM, with little time for rest or recreation, not knowing where to watch their backs while moles in their own agencies betray them.

The tale is taut, the momentum great, the atmosphere grim, the body count keeps mounting, the jive is feverish, the thrills are torrential and there’s a lot of smoking. Not to be missed.

Compared to the aforementioned, Barbara Seranella’s “Unpaid Dues” radiates the bucolic straightforwardness of an urban elegy. It’s West L.A., the year after the 1984 Olympics, and, as in every other year, savage murders, battered women, bloody brutes, police work that’s not too introspective pervade an exuberant scene. Munch Mancini, Seranella’s resilient heroine, is torn between her satisfying toil as a garage mechanic and spooky recollections of a grubby, druggy past.

Rememberings litter the text with italics and grow more urgent and intrusive when an old friend from times gone by is found with her throat cut at the bottom of a storm drain at the exclusive Riviera Country Club, not far from the joggers in $200 tennis shoes and slit-seam shorts who breathe the exhaust fumes on San Vicente Boulevard. Munch’s past won’t go away, and, as she delves into it, old sins rise in her gorge like vomit.

The killing just committed involves her in the investigation of an old triple murder. Will she have to pay now for the antic indiscretions that entangled her with dope and violence? Or will she manage to preserve her present life and the joys of chivvying reticent carburetors and tightening lug nuts? Seranella ran away from her West L.A. home at 14, hippied in Haight-Ashbury, rode with motorcycle gangs, then became a mechanic before acquiring a husband and dogs, so she knows what she is writing about. It shows; and it’s all for the better. *