A suicide? Not likely

Good Morning, Midnight

Reginald Hill

HarperCollins: 434 pp., $24.95

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Thieves Break In

Cristina Sumners

Bantam: 336 pp., $6.99 paper

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A Murder of Justice

Robert Andrews

Putnam: 322 pp., $24.95

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A Perfect Life

Mike Stewart

Dell: 448 pp., $6.50 paper

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English mysteries are more relaxed than ours. They move at a more leisurely pace; the social scene seems less ruffled; the action less stormy; the actors, more even-tempered, use more measured words. Unfolding in Yorkshire, only a few hours from London when the trains run on time, Reginald Hill’s “Good Morning, Midnight” is a case in point. Pal Maciver, a local businessman, works for the company Ashur-Profitt (get it?). One dark, though not stormy, night, Pal is found dead in the locked library of a Maciver mansion, in circumstances curiously similar to those in which his father, also an executive of the concern his family founded but Americans bought, had been discovered 10 years before.

Suicide, or mock-up of one? Clearing up the mystery takes 400 pages: not bad, given the rate at which police solve or fail to solve their cases.

Maciver kin, friends and investigators meander through mazes of family friendships and feuds and through equally complex conjunctures affecting police personnel. There are beautiful women, perceptive cops, British intelligence operatives, adulterous relations and other illicit activities. There are versicles from the poetry of Emily Dickinson; there’s deliciously eccentric Aunt Lavinia and her amateur aviary; and there’s the small town as an enticing setting. The dim lights and tangled circumstances of Hill’s twisty plot are straightened out in time, and his cast’s lives and actions become more limpid, though hardly more intelligible.

Still, Hill provides mystified readers with one major clue. Both Macivers, father and son, go by the name of Pal, short for Palinurus. That’s the name of Aeneas’ pilot, who, sailing away from Troy, fell overboard one night when all the ship’s company was sleeping. Bear the Aeneid in mind when you tackle this pleasurable puzzle.

Cristina Sumners’ “Thieves Break In” is about Americans abroad. And where can Americans be more at home abroad than in Oxford and the English shires? That’s where young Rev. Kathryn Koerney, a New Jersey minister, and her policeman pal, Tom Holder, travel just as Kathryn’s cousin Rob falls to his death from the battlements of Datchworth Castle. Though the time is the present, though cars and modern conveniences are up to date, Datchworth and the family that extends hospitality in that historic and bucolic spot are more representative of Agatha Christie’s England than of Tony Blair’s. So are master-servant relations in a fairy tale world on which wicked witches intrude.

Police investigations seconded by Kathryn and Tom open a Pandora’s box of family accidents, affairs and occultations that turn Rob’s header into an accident (it isn’t one) extrinsic to the action, which is about something else. Quite what, it would be hard to say because of a construction so contorted and confusing with its switchback effects that it’s hard to track. That is a pity, because the setting is seductive, the writing pleasurable, the characters congenial, the atmosphere cozy and the thrills muted. But then, where can flights of fancy nestle more comfortably than within reach of Oxford’s dreaming spires?

Mordant, dynamic, rousing, effervescent, provocative and just plain good. That’s Robert Andrews’ latest, “A Murder of Justice.” Two bad hombres shot as they sit in a car on a southeast Washington street. One is dead, the other will die soon, as will other assorted members of an ill-fated cast. Working the case, two homicide detectives, Frank Kearney and Jose Phelps of the D.C. police, quarry, scrape and scrabble through the evidence and the wits that could lead them through a long string of drug-related crimes behind the shooting and point at the guilty parties.

The paths Frank and Jose follow are treacherous and ugly. They negotiate the minefields of the capital, where gangbangers and do-gooders shamble through the ruins of an urban wasteland. They endure their superiors, who, when their cant goes agley, know how to shift blame on someone else. They suffer, though not gladly, D.C.’s wilderness of distorting mirrors and its politicos trained to patronize and manipulate.

Yet professionalism and steadfastness pay off to reveal the web of deception and self-service that poisons the justice system and the marrow of civil society. In the end, we draw breath. Good has triumphed over evil once again, for this is fiction. But superior fiction, etched with a sharp, fierce, steely -- and talented -- pen.

Thrillers are supposed to be twisted, tortuous, perplexing. But Mike Stewart’s “A Perfect Life” is more raveled, roiled and contorted than most. No wonder, since Scott Thomas, its hero, is a young clinical psychologist just out of Harvard, caught in the toils of an inexplicable plot designed to make him the fall guy for a murder he did not commit and a medley of mishaps he must try to decipher.

Scott’s every move is watched, and deeds he never did are attributed to him in an incomprehensible montage that makes his guilt evident to all but himself and a couple of helpmates he picks up on the way. As criminal activities multiply to implicate the innocent man and to confirm his guilt, Scott struggles to prove his rectitude, and he of course succeeds, though only after 400 pages of cranky adversities, adventures and bloodletting in which computers play a crucial role.

A corporate attorney, Mike Stewart’s earlier ventures into the mystery field have been legal thrillers. Here, he thanks a friend and computer expert for technological advice in handling the labyrinthine mysteries of Internet (in)security and identity theft. But the warped ride on which he sends Scott Thomas calls even more stridently for the skills of an alienist. *