The murky murder trade

Ragtime in Simla

Barbara Cleverly

Dell: 354 pp., $6.99 paper

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Trace

Patricia Cornwell

Putnam: 448 pp., $26.95

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A Gentleman’s Game

Greg Rucka

Bantam: 368 pp., $24

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Sea of Bones

Ron Faust

Bantam: 368 pp., $6.99 paper

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“Ragtime in Simla” is Barbara Cleverly’s cleverly contrived evocation of dirty tricks in a bygone world: the damaged yet exhilarating years that followed World War I, here reconstituted in British India -- specifically in a distant outpost of Empire, the fashionable mountain resort of Simla, 7,000 feet up in the Himalayan foothills. That’s where Cmdr. Joe Sandilands of Scotland Yard arrives in spring 1922, as houseguest of the lieutenant governor of Bengal, who has invited him to solve the mystery of a murder that almost at once becomes two murders.

Pursued in tandem with the veteran local police superintendent, Sandilands’ inquiries carry this easy-paced, engaging and highly readable book into a maelstrom of revelations that expose layer upon layer of duplicity, deceptions and false identities. Taking Kipling’s advice that the female of the species is more deadly than the male, the two bobbies check out local memsahibs, worldly wise vixens, seductive trollops, louche hussies, with a few lotharios thrown in for good measure. Their explorations demonstrate (to riff on Kipling again) “how very little, since the world was made / Things have altered in the murder trade.”

Feelers, explorations and meanders, meanwhile, allow Cleverly to sketch the resort’s Anglo Indian society but, above all, provide much local color and period detail. The police procedures of a pre-technological age, of course; but also rickshaws and Decca gramophones complete with walnut case and trumpet and the jazz and ragtime that they play. Most people smoke gaspers. Some men wear two-tone correspondent shoes -- whose descendants later generations more graphically described as brothel creepers. And capacious women’s knickers, defended by top-and-bottom elastic bands, play a significant role. Knickers or not, here’s a charming book that you won’t want to put down, even when it’s over.

You won’t want to put down “Trace” either. Kay Scarpetta is back, along with Marino and Benton and Lucy (here a bit of a drag). Back, too, is Patricia Cornwell at the top of her form, whipping her characters through their paces in a plot that seethes with disquieting conjectures and calls up E.M. Forster’s behest to “only connect.”

Serial killers are hard to track, because their motives are rational only in the irrational universe through which they slouch and rattle. When Scarpetta, once chief medical examiner of Virginia, is called to help clear up a murky death in her old Richmond haunts, the authorities don’t even know they’re looking for a slaughterer -- let alone a multiple one. That becomes plain to them only long after readers have been clued in by the choppy flow of suggestive, often harrowing data elicited by Scarpetta, her kin and her friends. The harvesting and connecting of dots of evidence is the core of the compelling and intricate tale with which Cornwell puzzles, disconcerts, distracts, torments and enthralls us.

A good few of the tip-offs come from the Trace Evidence Section of the medical examiner’s forensic science labs and the anatomic offal that our authoritative heroine processes and interprets. So we get a manual of forensic procedures in the medical examiner’s system -- which has gone a bit skew-whiff after five years of Scarpetta’s absence. We meet the rancid examiner who replaced her and who resents her presence. We’re introduced to a large cast that includes psychojerks, not least the repulsive antihero. And we’re invited to feel for Scarpetta, whose emotions get the upper hand before they serve to advance the action. In the end, everything connects; nothing much is resolved, but it’s been a cunning, captivating performance.

Greg Rucka’s latest tidings from spy-and-slaughter land are also a super concoction: electric, explosive, exhilarating and hurtling at a furious pace. Determined to confirm the blurb’s affirmation that spying is no longer “A Gentleman’s Game,” Rucka makes his heroine a charming virago. His vertiginous thriller turns on the doings and undoings of terrorists and counter-terrorists, dreamers, bigots and professionals, all tough, all versed in deception, martial arts and killing a la carte, operating in England and in the Middle East.

Tara Chace, head of a special operations unit of British intelligence, has to exact retribution for a multi-murderous assault on the London Underground and repay terror with terror. The mission is successful, but then, to save her own life, she has to neutralize a terrorist lair in the Saudi desert, all the while fending off the cretinocracy of Her Majesty’s Government. Her triumphs and travails keep one turning the pages through gory piles of prey and collateral damage, through snares, delusions, bloodbaths and bouts of sex in bed and varied other venues, to an end that would be more satisfying were it not also sad.

There’s a lot of wet work, a lot of intel craft, a lot of graphic violence and a steadfast recurrence of showers. The detail of intelligence work seemed convincingly realistic. But I doubt that British agents would dive into a shower at the drop of a wet hat, as Americans are apt to do. That is my only cavil about a top-notch tale.

Ron Faust’s “Sea of Bones” hauls us back across the Atlantic to Bell Harbor in Florida, where hero Dan Shaw’s earlier adventures evolved. Also to Suffolk, England, and Sorrento, Italy, and a lot of flying in between. It is just as polished, vigorous, lusty, frisky and occasionally athletic as its predecessor, “Dead Men Rise Up Never.” This time, Shaw, that well-read tough guy, now trying to pass the Florida bar exam, gets caught up in a complicated dodge designed to divest a wicked confidence trickster of his ill-gotten gains and restore millions to the dupes he bilked. In the course of foiling the elusive villain, Shaw succumbs to carnal temptations and enjoys other comforts, too, that place him and others in jeopardy. But then where would thrillers be without risk and lubricity?

This is a great shocker. Faust’s grasp of the hierarchies of British peerage is shaky. But he regales readers with an intricate plot, fast-moving action, glittering dialogue, pricey locales, lots of flashed skin, fugitive couplings, bad vibes that get more vibrant all the time and a murky motif unfolding -- mostly -- in the Florida sun. *