Atkins’ first novel, “Crossroad Blues,” found Nick lost in the mystery surrounding the death of Robert Johnson. Another part of Johnson’s legend, the story of the blues guitarist selling his soul at the crossroads, reverberates through the fourth Nick Travers mystery, the terrifically titled “Dirty South.” The focus here is on hip-hop, with Nick, a one-time pro football player, helping out an old teammate who has made a killing as a hip-hop impresario. Nick’s buddy is in debt to some very bad men and is trying to hold on to his new meal ticket, a 15-year-old millionaire rapper named Alias.

The prickly, implied idea behind “Dirty South” is that, except for an older generation of black people (and mostly Southern blacks at that), blues has become almost entirely of interest only to white folks, fans and archivists and academics like Nick himself. To the kids and young adults hooked on hip-hop, the blues is as antiquated as a tub washing machine with a wringer on top. Atkins doesn’t berate Alias or the hip-hop fans who turn up in the book for ignoring their heritage; he realizes that’s an old duffer’s game.

What makes “Dirty South” so potent is Atkins’ suggestion that hip-hoppers who’ve never heard of Robert Johnson may be living out part of his legacy: In the world of “Dirty South” there’s always a devil waiting at the crossroads to tempt these kids into selling their souls. (The plethora of posthumous releases in the hip-hop racks of the record store bear out Atkins’ implied contention that the most profitable rapper is a dead one.) The sting of the book is that instead of gaining the chops Johnson did, they are trading away what made their music special. “You like seein’ your face off buses and bein’ thug-lipped over Times Square and it’s cool,” says Alias at one point, “but somehow you feel like you losin’ you. Your rhymes not comin’ out the way you feel. The beats you hear sound like someone openin’ up a tin can.”

The mystery Atkins sets up here is good, solidly constructed as his mysteries always are. But what works its way under your skin is Atkins’ peculiar combination of realism and eeriness. The raggedy assassin who sets off after Nick is a walking bad dream, and he materializes and disappears with the insidiousness of a truly evil spirit. As a writer, Atkins knows how to walk fine lines with perfect balance; his books are compassionate, hard and richly atmospheric in a way that never overshadows narrative. As much as anyone else writing, he escapes the sentimentality that bedevils hard-boiled fiction. The end of “Dirty South” finds Nick settled in a way that suggests, if not the end of his journey, at least some well-earned peace. You’d have to be a piker to begrudge Nick that — but I really hope “Dirty South” isn’t his final appearance in print.

“Stone Cribs”
By Kris Nelscott
323 pages
St. Martin’s Minotaur
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With “Stone Cribs,” her fourth Smokey Dalton mystery, Kris Nelscott can lay claim to the strongest series of detective novels now being written by an American author. “Stone Cribs” picks up where the previous book, “Thin Walls,” left off, in 1969 Chicago. Beginning with her first book, “A Dangerous Road,” set in Memphis a few months before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Nelscott has been detailing the racial politics of those years.

Here, she ventures into the sexual politics of the years before Roe vs. Wade. Smokey comes home to his Chicago apartment one night to find a woman bleeding to death from a botched abortion in his neighbor Marvella’s apartment. He and his girlfriend Laura rush her to the hospital and encounter a doctor who will not intervene to save the woman’s life until she names the doctor who operated on her.

That’s the kind of detail that makes 35 years ago seem like the Dark Ages. (And with the Bush administration doing what it can to set back abortion rights, with John Ashcroft subpoenaing the names of women who’ve undergone partial-birth abortions, it’s an age we’re about to plunge right back into.) As in the previous Smokey Dalton books, Nelscott’s method is to make the distance of that past seem immediate.

It was an article of feminist faith, in the era which Nelscott is writing about here, that all women were disadvantaged as a class. Nelscott knows that’s a lie. Laura, who’s rich and white and therefore able to use her influence to secure treatment for the injured woman, would never, just by virtue of who she is, find herself in the same boat. Yet the fact that this indignity is being done to a woman allows her a kinship that transcends race and class.

The plot has to do with Smokey investigating the underground network of abortion providers, and with the women who try to keep track of those providers, steering pregnant women away from the butchers. It’s a measure of Nelscott’s control that even when the plot veers into the way the Chicago police used gang violence to their advantage, “Stone Cribs” never feels as if it’s losing focus.

What’s strongest in “Stone Cribs” is how good Nelscott is at calling up the way that blacks, in the law and order of the Nixon years, lived life with the feeling that a gun was pressed to their backs. This is a book about having to toe the line, a state of being reinforced by the fact that Smokey must keep his real identity secret to protect his adopted son Jimmy, a witness to the King assassination, and by the need to keep his love affair with Laura low-key. The conception doesn’t allow for much humor, and there’s less of Laura in this installment than I’d like.

But Nelscott brings her mysteries both a sense of moral urgency and the instincts of the muckraking social novelist. She’s a superb plotter with a steely grasp of how to sustain tension. I have yet to finish one of her Smokey Dalton novels without feeling that she has navigated the divisiveness of a tumultuous time in our collective social history and has not slighted any of the complexities involved. To call her a fine historical novelist is to relegate these books to the past. They read like investigations of unfinished business, a reminder of the wounds those years inflicted that have never healed. Nelscott is fast becoming one of our most invaluable novelists.

“The 37th Hour”
By Jodi Compton
324 pages
Delacorte Press
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Jodi Compton’s debut novel “The 37th Hour,” the first in a projected series about Minnesota sheriff’s detective Sarah Pribek, is just promising enough to make you hope she works out the kinks by the next installment.

Compton is working with a good, nervous-making premise. Pribek’s specialty is missing person’s cases, and here she finds herself tracking down another cop, an intensely private man who happens to be her husband of two months. When he leaves for FBI training at Quantico, Va., and doesn’t turn up, Pribek begins investigating and inevitably runs into the secrets of his past.

Compton’s title refers to the point in a disappearance after which it’s considered nearly impossible to find a missing person alive — if they’re found at all. That should give her a built-in, racing-against-deadline tension. But Compton dilutes the tension with flashbacks establishing Pribek’s past as well as her husband’s. Worse, the revelations that Pribek discovers are not only signaled too early but have a clichéd Freudian quality. You never understand why Pribek’s hackles wouldn’t be raised by a husband so guarded and tightlipped about his past. That might be understandable if Compton had dramatized, or even addressed, how Pribek’s personal attachment to the case impedes her cop’s instincts. A little humor wouldn’t have hurt either.

But missing persons are still fertile ground for mysteries, and the opening set-piece, in which Pribek tracks down a missing teenage girl, suggests the kind of excitement Compton could easily learn to sustain over an entire book. Having dispensed with much of the background information of the characters here, she may, in the next Pribek novel, be in a good position to tighten the narrative and let Pribek develop as a character. “The 37th Hour” ends with a cloud hanging over Pribek’s future, one that could turn the cop into someone with a motive to disappear. It’s good, ambiguous ground to build on.

“Midnight Pass”
By Stuart M. Kaminsky
269 pages
Forge
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This third book in the series about Sarasota process server Lew Fonesca could be one of the old black-and-white movies the hero likes to watch in the seedy office that also serves as his apartment. Stuart M. Kaminsky, who’s written a series of novels about a detective in ’30s and ’40s Hollywood, as well as film bios and screenplays, brings in all the elements you might expect in a ’40s B-programmer: “colorful” supporting characters, a villain whose wealth doesn’t do much to hide his sleaziness, and a hard-boiled softy of a hero. It’s hackneyed, but Kaminsky is smooth enough to keep you turning the pages.

Best among the oddballs who pop up here are Lew’s shrink, an elderly, tart-tongued Jewish woman who insists he bring coffee and Danish to their sessions (it seems to be part of his reduced rate) and gives him homework like making him come in with jokes to tell her. (At least one of them is a scream.)

But having established over three books that Fonesca is haunted by the death of his wife, it’s time for Kaminsky to act as a bit of a shrink himself and give his hero a push. The woman he’s been seeing, a social worker with two kids of her own, isn’t going to wait around forever for Lew to unload his sack of woe, and she’s appealing enough that you wish he’d try. And though Lew seems to be perfectly content to live in the back room of his seedy office, sleeping on a cot and watching discount VHS tapes on his battered television set, would it be too much to ask to make him flush enough to afford some modest digs? He’s a very sympathetic character, but it’s distracting, each time he goes out to meet someone, to wonder about what kind of impression he’s making when he can’t even take a shower in the Florida humidity.

Here, as always, a Hayder plot that seems straightforward is masterfully skewed. In Bath, England, Lorne Wood, a privileged teenage beauty, is found horribly murdered beside a canal. Detective Inspector Zoe Benedict is led, by instinct as much as evidence, to suspect a connection to the sex trade and Internet pornography, a realm that Hayder evokes in all its dankness. “[M]ost of the time they’re doing it because it’s easier than standing behind a till at Top Shop for eight hours a day,” one avuncular pornographer tells Zoe of his “models.” Less benign are fetishistic practices “all about humiliating the woman.” As one jaded dame explains, this is what sells “by the shedload … Makes you wonder about human nature, don’t it?”

Zoe doesn’t wonder anymore. She has seen too much. And she has secrets of her own. But that is another story, one of a handful that Hayder expertly steers on parallel tracks as she shunts the murder investigation forward, then makes it stall or veer, all the while heightening our sense of dread. While Zoe courts danger by revisiting her past and pursuing Lorne’s likely killer, Zoe’s estranged sister, Sally, becomes the housekeeper for a nouveau-squire who exudes criminality and violence. Divorced, somewhat clueless, and mother to teenage Millie, Sally has little choice. She does, however, have a shady lover who reveals that Sally’s employer is involved with the Ministry of Defense, the UN mission in Kosovo, and sex trafficking.

These are filaments that flicker at the periphery of our anxious vision while Zoe and Sally demand our attention. Especially Zoe, who, like many female Hayder protagonists, is both wounded and feral. Slumped in a toilet cubicle, for example, her own blood dripping onto the floor, she resolves to “…take some time off work…. Sleep rough and drink Guinness out of the can.” Fueled by desperation more than courage, Zoe is as startling as the cinematic action scenes that Hayder so expertly stages. Shocks intensify — a nail gun comes into play, a body is dismembered, foul sex committed — while the tidal pull of Hayder’s intersecting narratives churns up tangled evidence that could incriminate Sally’s vile employer, a local drug dealer or a lovesick teenager. Toward the end, the sisters traverse moonlit farmland — “Two lonely figures casting long blue shadows…feet shushing the dead corn” — to confront Lorne’s killer and the final horror. Which is not, of course, the end at all.

The reports are in about the books President Obama is looking at on his annual trip to Martha’s Vineyard. According to reports from the Los Angeles Times and the AP, Obama purchased five books on his trip to the Vineyard bookseller Bunch of Grapes: Marianna Baer’s Frost, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Daniel Woodrell’s Bayou Trilogy, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Ward Just’s Rodin’s Debutante.

The second wave came when, according to Alexis Simendinger, White House aides listed for reporters the three books Obama brought with him to the Vineyard: two more novels — Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land — and one nonfiction work — Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.

This “may constitute the oddest assortment of presidential reading material ever disclosed,” according to Troy. Because Woodrell’s books may be almost universally praised, but they are genre fiction, and genre fiction is too trashy for presidents to read. “Bill Clinton, for example, used to love mysteries, but he did not advertise the titles of what he once called ‘my little cheap thrills outlet.’” Even Bill Clinton knew better than to tell people he read books with crimes in them! (Can you imagine if Barack Obama was found to be hiding the fact that he read crime fiction? IMPEACHMENT.)

Also one of the novels is by an Israeli author, but it is by an Israeli author who criticizes Israeli policy, proving once again that Obama is no friend of Israel. “[R]eading this novel will likely not assuage those concerned about Obama’s views on the Middle East,” says Troy, and he should know, because he is the one using it to attempt to score an insane political point.

The best part (noted by Matt Yglesias) is when Troy asks why this bookstore’s online store doesn’t list horrible books written by National Review contributors as “in stock.”

Obama, like other Democratic presidents, has tended to read mainly liberal books, although he could stand to gain some insight from conservative ones. There could be many reasons for his selection bias, but buying his books at the “legendary” Bunch of Grapes probably is not helping matters. While I have never had the pleasure of shopping there, the store’s website highlights a variety of its offerings, with nary a conservative work. There may be some on the shelves there somewhere, but they are probably not staring Obama in the face when he visits the store.

According to the results of my completely unscientific survey of Bunch of Grapes’s website, Laura Ingraham’s Of Thee I Zing, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, and Mark Steyn’s After America were listed as available for online ordering. Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded, which appeared as an Obama book selection twice, in 2008 and 2009, was listed as “In Stock.” This is not meant as a criticism of the bookseller; Bunch of Grapes is running a business, and they need to cater to the liberal crowd at Martha’s Vineyard in order to bring in customers. At the same time, if Obama wants to diversify his reading selections, Bunch of Grapes may not be the place to go.

Why would Bunch of Grapes stock Emma Donoghue’s “Room,” a novel Aimee Bender called “truly memorable” and “remarkable,” when they could stock Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism,” a book that the American Conservative says “reads less like an extended argument than as a catalogue of conservative intellectual clichés, often irrelevant to the supposed point of the book”? Liberal bias, that’s why. Liberal fascist bias.

Anyway, the president is “out of touch” and “in a bubble” because he can read, according to a conservative intellectual, at a “think tank.”

Christie however, is quite a looker, though I see where Martin saw the female knight in her: The actress is 6’3.

Martin revealed the meaning of his riddle later that night:

As for my clues … Christie played in a music video called DAMARIS, which includes a song about Isabelle, the She-Wolf of France (wife of King Edward II, for the history nerds out there), and played in Shakespeare’s CYMBELINE at the Barbican theatre. She also posed for Australian photographed Polly Borland for a show called “Bunny.”

She also appears in the recent Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassas, though I did not use that one in my clues.

Here’s Gwendoline in action, in a (very) short NOMAD film called “Ourhouse.”

Oh yeah, she’s going to be great.

An earlier announcement has pegged “The Tudors” actress Natalie Dormer to play 16-year-old Margaery Tyrell.

In the first sentence above, I’m referring to a recent kerfuffle among film critics that began with a New York Times Magazine article by Dan Kois and continued with responses by Times critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott and numerous others (including yours truly). This included various allegations of crimes against art and totalitarian groupthink, along with unhelpful discussion of the meaning of the word “boring.” Thankfully, the schism that was conjured up between intolerable art-house snobs and lightweight slaves of Hollywood is mostly imaginary. Hardly anyone who cares about cinema only likes one kind of movie, or judges every movie by the same standard. Right now, I’m suggesting that you should catch “Aurora” (with the parenthesis that it’s not going to be everybody’s cup of bitter Romanian coffee), and I’d say almost the same thing, with slightly more apologetic eye-rolling, about “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.”

Still, that debate provided an interesting background for “Aurora,” which I found to be a gritty, atmospheric and nerve-wracking work that powerfully evokes the disordered mental condition and depressed surroundings of its middle-aged protagonist (played by Puiu himself). I totally get that the idea of watching a three-hour film in Romanian is daunting, but once I adjusted to Puiu’s rhythms I was fully engaged. That said, if you go in expecting a conventional mode of narrative and explication, where every scene advances us further into the plot in some specific way, and you understand who all the people are and how they relate to each other, then this movie will frustrate you and drive you completely freakin’ nuts.

As in the film that made Puiu’s international reputation, “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” the narrative of “Aurora” is turned upside-down, or maybe inside out. The earlier movie tells us what’s going to happen in the title, and then we don’t, in fact, witness the death of Dante Lazarescu, only the entirely ordinary day full of quarreling neighbors and distracted nurses and mechanical malfunctions that’s going to be the last one of his life. Instead of the intense subjectivity of most movies, where the hero’s trials and tribulations become the focus of heightened and artificial drama, Puiu pulls back to a more objective view, reminding us that momentous events in the real world don’t come with a pulsing soundtrack or a temporary suspension of the universal tendency toward entropy.

Puiu’s character in “Aurora,” who we eventually learn is named Viorel, may be having a worse day than Mr. Lazarescu, if that’s possible. A taciturn and nearly affectless fellow of 40 or so, he skulks through the streets of Bucharest, by car and by bus and on foot, with a haunted look in his eyes. Viorel appears to be a family man, at least in the deceptively calm opening scene, but things have evidently gone wrong somehow (and trust me, it’s not worth trying to figure it out). He appears to be following a blond woman (not his wife) with small children, although we don’t know who they are; he has fragmentary conversations we can’t hear or can’t understand; he acquires a shotgun and some ammunition and spends some time considering suicide before deciding on, shall we say, a more extroverted path. But the startling eruptions of violence in “Aurora” are momentary, and occur either outside the frame or deep in the middle distance. They emerge from a life full of other things: Even as Viorel is noticeably sliding into insanity, he haggles with movers, stands in line at the deli, collects some ironed shirts from his mother, has a testy exchange with his stepfather and a cordial one with a neighbor over water damage accidentally caused by an enthusiastic kid in the bathtub.

Puiu’s films belong to a recognizable tradition of Eastern European social comedy, and depict post-Communist Romania as a place where everybody feels aggrieved at everybody else and where nothing can ever happen without a great deal of pointless argument and defensive grumpery. In a way, that’s the joke of the film, that even a guy going on a killing spree has to navigate the tremendous hassle of Romanian society, and that nobody much cares. I don’t think Puiu is blaming Romania’s depressed and contentious national mood for Viorel’s crimes, exactly; Americans are all too aware that this sort of thing can happen anywhere. Mordant, anti-psychological and masterfully shot (by Viorel Sergovici), “Aurora” is both a mystery and a mysterious accomplishment. It may demand multiple viewings, both to understand a bit more about what’s going on and also, if you get me, to figure out what the hell is going on.

“Aurora” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, and will open Aug. 27 at the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, Mass., with other cities and dates (and home-video release) to follow.

In her May obituary, the Los Angeles Times described Clark as “a copper tycoon’s daughter with a taste for exquisite French dolls, baronial homes and solitude;” the New York Times labelled her “the last link to New York’s Gilded Age” — a relic from “the city’s glory days of Astors, Guggenheims and Vanderbilts.” Clark had been raised in a different world, and (or so the papers implied) she seemed to have stayed there, isolating herself from the twenty-first century and its inhabitants.

Indeed, Clark might have died in relative obscurity (as much obscurity as someone worth $400 million can achieve, at least) had it not been for several MSNBC features published last year, including one that questioned the motives of those who cared for the heiress, asking provocatively: “Who protects an old lady who secluded herself from the world, limiting her life to a single room, playing dress-up with her dolls and watching cartoons?” The piece ignited interest in Huguette, ensuring that plenty of eyes would be trained on her estate in the instance of her demise.

Now that Clark has died, questions about her estate and vast personal holdings are finally being answered. The heiress’ will was released this week — you can read the entire document here (pdf), courtesy of the New York Post — and it has some interesting bequests.

Part of Clark’s immense estate will be used to start a new fund, the Bellosguardo Foundation, “for the primary purpose of fostering and promoting the Arts.” The showpiece of the foundation will be Bellosguardo itself: Clark’s grand California home, set on 23 acres and reportedly worth $100 million. The property will be made into a museum — filled with art (including paintings by Renoir and John Singer Sargent), musical instruments (including a Stradivarius), and rare books, all moved west from Clark’s kingly 42-room Fifth Avenue apartments. Clark herself had apparently not visited Bellosguardo “for at least 50 years” before her death; now, the house will likely attract large crowds.

Not all of Clark’s art will go to the California estate, however; a $25 million Monet — one of the “Water Lilies” paintings — has been left to Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery, which already has a wing named after Clark’s senator father (and owns his 775-piece art collection).

As to the people who will personally profit from Clark’s will — including, prominently, the heiress’ longtime nurse — The Atlantic Wire has assembled a handy cheat sheet. Clark left nothing to her relatives, whom her attorney, Wallace Bock, says she “knowingly and assiduously avoided” over the years.

One million dollars will be split between Bock himself and Clark’s accountant, Irving Kamsler, both of whom fell under suspicion for mismanagement of Clark’s wealth when last year’s MSNBC report was released. “The Manhattan district attorney’s office is investigating how Mr. Bock and Mr. Kamsler have handled Mrs. Clark’s money, according to a person briefed on the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity,” The New York Times reported Wednesday.