At play in L.A.

Authenticity -- artistic, cultural, journalistic, even romantic -- is the issue in Denise Hamilton’s latest Eve Diamond mystery, “Savage Garden.” Eve, a Los Angeles Times reporter who keeps stumbling onto crimes and solving them, goes with her boyfriend, Silvio Aguilar, to the premiere of a play at the Mark Taper Forum and discovers that the lead actress, Catarina Velosi, has disappeared. Silvio, whom Eve wants to trust but hasn’t known very long, becomes evasive. It turns out that he is one of Catarina’s many ex-lovers; in fact, Eve finds out, he visited the actress that very morning, and her apartment shows signs of a struggle.

Silvio isn’t the only suspect. The playwright, Alfonso Reventon, has used the volatile Catarina as a muse to evoke the raw barrio conflicts that are the subject of his art. Alfonso has beaten his wife, Marisela; it’s not unimaginable that he would kill Catarina after learning that she had taken up with another man. Marisela, adopted as an infant and raised in the middle class, has her own motives for murder. She could never match the “authentic” Latino experience of poverty and violence -- the street “cred”-- that kept drawing Alfonso back to Catarina. So why not eliminate her?

Eve’s editors try, without much success, to keep her away from the story because she’s personally involved in it. They assign her to mentor a newly hired reporter, Felice Morgan, in the wake of Jayson Blair’s fabrications at the New York Times. Felice, like Blair, is young, African American and charismatic; therefore, in the view of nervous newspaper executives, every word she writes requires extra scrutiny. Eve resents having to be a combination baby-sitter and spy. She also worries that Felice, if she isn’t making things up, might just be talented and hungry enough to leave her mentor behind.

The two make an effective reporting team, though Felice’s use of anonymous sources raises a red flag, and parts of her resume turn out to be untrue.

Eve, desperate to clear Silvio, or at least to resolve her doubts about him, refuses to stop digging -- especially after Catarina is found dead, shot in the head, at the base of a cliff on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Unidentified gunmen warn Eve to back off, but they have no more luck than her editors. She interviews the drama teacher who “discovered” Catarina and resents Alfonso’s influence over the actress. Eve fends off advances from a thuggish political aide who has a mysterious connection with Marisela. Then Felice is kidnapped. Eve’s only clue to her whereabouts is a brief cellphone message in which the younger reporter calls herself “Jayson” -- acknowledging Eve’s suspicions and reproaching her for having them.

“Savage Garden” is the kind of mystery in which the identity of the killer is hidden so cleverly that when we finally learn who it is, we hardly care. On the other hand, Hamilton is only getting better as a storyteller. Her prose crackles; the nervy but vulnerable personality of Eve continues to drive the action. Felice and Marisela are complex enough to be protagonists in novels of their own.

As in “Sugar Skull” and “Last Lullaby,” Hamilton, a former reporter for The Times, is a reliable guide to the tangled sociology of Los Angeles. Eve and Silvio struggle with Anglo-Latino differences, and many of the other characters have been seduced by the idea -- common to suburban kids who like gangsta rap -- that only the lives of the poor are truly real. But those lives can also be demoralizing and ugly, as Marisela discovers when she tracks down members of her birth family in the barrio and tries in vain to help them.

Some readers will be relieved to find that Hamilton’s fictional reporters have no political bias to speak of, but others may wonder at their myopia. They are careerists, pure and simple; they lust after scoops, compete for better jobs, but seem indifferent to the wider implications of their work. The Jayson Blair case was embarrassing indeed, but it was a case of individual pathology. Some may find more alarming today’s trend toward the exploitation of journalistic errors -- and the discrediting of entire news organizations -- for partisan advantage. A newsroom observer as acute as Hamilton might have tackled this issue too -- though if she had, perhaps “Savage Garden” wouldn’t have been so authentic a summer read. *