Here's a suggestion: You may want to have a stash of Snickers bars on the night table before picking up Elizabeth George's latest British whodunit, "In the Presence of the Enemy." This is the kind of smart, tantalizing novel that inspires late-night sugar runs. (It doesn't help that one of George's ne'er-do-well characters is a hardcore chocolate fiend who inhales Cadbury Whole Nut bars, Kit Kats and Aeros with abandon.) If you haven't read her, George herself is something of a treat. She's a fortysomething Californian who's been an anglophile since the age of 16 (when she first traveled to England), and she writes mysteries that are steeped in the lingo of London. In her new novel, George's core ensemble is back: Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, of Scotland Yard; his partner Sergeant Barbara Havers; friends Simon and Deborah St. James; and his betrothed, Lady Helen Clyde. George cleverly picks up the threads and neuroses of each life, but at the heart of the book is a deftly-plotted tale spun around an emotionally stunted MP, her fanciful daughter who's been kidnapped, a macho Fleet Street editor, his ex-supermodel wife and a naive local constable. George may like old-fashioned mysteries, but this is very much a '90s novel, full of references to such subjects as the IRA, bulimia and AIDS. ("Safe sex was great," George writes at one point, "but she couldn't understand why its proponents never quite made the leap from coital protection to post-coital clean-up.")

George's mystery unfolds at a leisurely pace -- perhaps too leisurely for readers accustomed to John Grisham's work. Lynley doesn't really show up until page 205. And George may be waxing a tad cute for her own good; her earlier novels had a harder edge. But this is an author whose appeal has always been in the getting there, and she does so in a literate and literary fashion, offering players that can sometimes seem as infuriating and inscrutable as Jane Austen's. There is one murder; the stage is set for another. The truth becomes clear in 517 pages. Better make that a whole bag of snickers.

-- Cynthia Hacinli