A ride down Los Angeles’ backstreets

Eve DIAMOND is a romantic whose job as a Los Angeles Times reporter requires her to be a cynic. This conflict gives ex-Times reporter Denise Hamilton’s third Diamond mystery novel, “Last Lullaby,” much of its interest and unpredictability. Eve wants to love and trust people who, more often than not, disappoint her. Her cynical part is the more reliable guide through Southern California’s urban dangers -- but that’s not the part she likes.

An old boyfriend shows up at Eve’s Silver Lake home while she’s investigating a shootout that left three dead at Los Angeles International Airport, two Russian gangsters and an Asian woman, whose 2-year-old daughter has been hustled into federal custody. Surely Tim Water’s appearance, six years after their breakup, is a coincidence. Memories of trying to “live a passion so large and cataclysmic, it threatened to engulf and destroy me” engulf her, though she’s still involved with Silvio Aguilar, her lover in the last novel, “Sugar Skull.”

Why not fall in love with Tim again? For that matter, why shouldn’t Eve trust the human rights attorney who wants to keep the toddler from being deported? Why shouldn’t she warm to a Cambodian woman, blind since witnessing Pol Pot’s atrocities, who runs an adoption agency in Long Beach? Why should she be so wary around the U.S. Customs official she was interviewing at LAX when the bullets started flying? He seems to tell nothing but sober truths: The little girl wasn’t the dead woman’s daughter; having already crossed the Pacific several times, she was probably being used as camouflage by drug smugglers.

In each case, the hard-boiled reporter in Eve warns the romantic not to get in too deep. Yet the little girl’s plight touches her in a way she previously couldn’t have imagined. She has been so driven as a career woman that she ruled out having pets, much less kids. But everyone else seems to care less for the sickly, stateless child, Serey Rath, than for other agendas. Besides, after the unsettling encounter with Tim, Eve has unprotected sex with Silvio and finds herself pregnant.

So she sets out to breach the wall of government secrecy and find the girl, and discovers that other people, ruthless men with guns, want to locate the toddler first. Eve’s philosophical reflections and romantic entanglements have to squeeze into the rare moments when she isn’t running for her life. Attractive, quick-witted and fast-talking -- Hamilton is at her best showing how a good reporter can worm facts out of sources that they never planned to reveal -- Eve is also limited. She has no gun, no expertise in the martial arts. Even her cynicism isn’t infallible. When she makes mistakes, the consequences are dire.

Another of Hamilton’s strengths is her grasp of the Southland’s shifting ethnic landscape. “Last Lullaby” leads us through seedy Chinatown hotels, a trendy “Asian fusion” restaurant, a backyard barbecue for Silvio’s abuelita (grandmother) and a cyber-cafe that might as well be an opium den, so oblivious are its denizens to the outside world.

It’s a letdown when, after much post-Sept. 11 posturing, the real issues prove to be nothing more than addiction and greed -- but letdowns seem to be a third Hamilton stock in trade. In a world of bogus heroes, the only person Eve can rely on, except maybe for Silvio, is an undocumented Guatemalan maid.

Right down to the car chase, kidnapping, explosion and arson fire at the end, this is formula stuff, but it’s a cut above the usual. This far into the series, Hamilton plots swiftly and knows her way around Eve’s complex psyche. Her minor characters have some of Robert (“The Horse Latitudes”) Ferrigno’s over-the-top weirdness, but, as with Ferrigno, good dialogue redeems them.

Hamilton’s narrative prose can recall potboilers past. (“Something smoldered at the core of him that had barely begun to kindle when events outside our control had brought the romance to a screeching halt.”) But it can also display so much freshness and sass (“I climbed up spongy wooden stairs that creaked under my weight as the termites held hands and moaned.”) that comparisons with Raymond Chandler aren’t too far out of line. *