The heist recounted here is the 2003 burglary of a building in Antwerp’s storied Diamond District, a neighborhood known for its “in-your-face display of armed, protected and monitored fortifications” that was once deemed “tight as a nun’s ass” by a John Gotti henchman. A team of expert Italian thieves, known as the School of Turin, made off with a haul of jewelry, cash, securities, precious metals, gems and, of course, a huge quantity of cut and rough diamonds, the exact value of which could not be determined. At minimum, the job nabbed $100 million in loot, more than any other robbery in history. Four men, out of what Belgian police believe was a minimum of eight conspirators, were ultimately arrested and jailed for the crime.

The building the team plundered was an office complex called the Diamond Center, which provided its tenants with storage in the supposedly impenetrable vault on its bottom floor. The building itself was located in the ultra-secure inner sanctum of the Diamond District, and was monitored by guards who permitted access only to badge-bearing tenants and their guests. Video cameras surveilled all entrances and hallways, as well as the foyer leading to the vault. The vault door itself was made of foot-thick iron and steel, double-locked using a long-necked key and a combination pad, as well as alarmed by two magnetic plates that would instantly alert an off-site security firm if they were separated during off-hours. The interior of the vault had a motion detector, a light detector and an infrared heat detector designed to go off at the temperature of the human body. A seismic alarm was set to trigger if it picked up the steady vibrations of a drill or saw. And on top of all that, the treasures inside the vault were divided among 189 safe deposit boxes, each one individually and sturdily locked.

The first half of “Flawless” sets up the challenge and the players, a coterie of career criminals most of whom had known each other for years. The man convicted of masterminding the crime, Leonardo Notarbartolo (there’s considerable debate over whether he was in fact the leader), began preparing for it a full two years in advance, renting an office in the Diamond Center and posing as a diamantaire, or diamond dealer. He videotaped the premises using a camera concealed in a shoulder bag and observed the staff’s security procedures, which turned out to be surprisingly lax despite the complex’s reputation. He took whatever information he could gather back to Turin, for further study by team members who specialized in lock picking or alarms and had nicknames like the Wizard of Keys.

Naturally, the comparison to “Ocean’s Eleven” is irresistible, and no one — least of all the press — has ever seen much reason to resist it. There’s a bit of history and diamond lore in “Flawless,” but the most fun comes from the parts where you’re thinking “How can they ever get past those infrared sensors?” and then the authors proceed to explain the way some clever criminal learned to use a common household product to thwart thousands of dollars worth of high-tech security equipment. Then there was the challenge of getting the stuff out — of the building, and out of Antwerp; the bag of diamonds alone weighed 44 pounds, “as much as a microwave oven.” The theft itself was executed with such meticulous care and precision it’s almost awe-inspiring — until you realize that the dumbest of down-time mistakes is going to wind up blowing the whole thing wide open.

Well, that and a crabby retiree obsessed with preserving a tiny patch of Belgian forest — but any more disclosures along those lines would constitute spoilage. Just when you think the story is winding down, with Notarbartolo playing sphinx behind bars while three other culprits take advantage of Italian bureaucracy to temporarily dodge the police, the authors serve up a tasty coda. Near the end of his six-year prison term, Notarbartolo offered Joshua Davis, a journalist from Wired magazine, his detailed account of the heist. This was published in a much-applauded article that the authors of “Flawless” thoroughly and persuasively debunk.

The Wired story was all kinds of fishy: Not only do the facts not add up, but before Davis came on the scene, Notarbartolo had been demanding money in exchange for his cooperation from various journalists. Then he suddenly refused to talk to anyone but Davis. Although Wired insists that Davis didn’t pay Notarbartolo for his story, Notarbartolo’s friends informed the authors of “Flawless” that Davis had “satisfied his commercial needs.” It seems likely that those needs extended to the movie deal Notarbartolo and Davis have since signed with J.J. Abrams (“Lost,” “Star Trek”). Nevertheless, despite the dicey aspects of the Wired piece, you can compensate for the main shortcoming of “Flawless” — an insufficiency of illustrations — by looking at the photos and diagrams accompanying it on Wired’s Web site.

As Selby and Campbell point out, what Notarbartolo may need most right now is economic cover. He’s out of jail, but closely watched. You see, the loot from the Antwerp job was never recovered; diamonds are famously hard to trace and relatively easy to liquidate. Notarbartolo and his confederates are in the peculiar position of sitting on piles of wealth they can’t actually spend without attracting highly undesirable attention from authorities. Being able to point to a Hollywood movie contract comes in handy when you have to justify stuff like the brand-new BMW hatchback Notarbartolo was caught driving recently. (It can’t really explain the kilogram of rough and polished diamonds stuffed between the car’s seats, but he had another story for that.)

A few key mysteries about the Antwerp diamond heist remain, most notably, how did the thieves get past the combination lock on the vault door and who else was in on the job? Every true crime narrative ought to feature a few unanswered questions. That’s one of the pleasures of the form, that little shiver of possibility, of secrets yet to be revealed and primed to be debated for decades; it was much more fun to speculate on who Deep Throat might have been than it is to know. One thing you can be sure of, though, when it comes to the Antwerp caper: Don’t believe what you see in the movies.

Before the Black Friday dawn, the sky is still a mix of dark blue and the sick sodium-vapor saffron of the suburban night. I park by the Beijing Chinese Super Buffet and walk across the lot to Best Buy, where hundreds of people — some in their twelfth or thirteenth hour of standing in line — await the day-after-Thanksgiving doorbuster sale.

“Tinsel” explores the considerable gap between the Christmases most Americans have and the ecstatic holiday nirvana they long for. One of the three Frisco families that Stuever follows is the Parnells, specifically Tammie Parnell, a 44-year-old mother of two whose titanic drive has been insufficiently tapped by the (supposed) dream job of affluent stay-at-home mom. The overflow of her energy goes into a business she calls Two Elves With a Twist (the second elf quit a couple of years ago, but who needs her?), which puts up interior Christmas decorations for McMansion dwellers who are too exhausted or aesthetically challenged to do it themselves. Rocketing around Frisco in an “enormous, Coke-can-red GMC Yukon XL” she calls “Big Red,” Tammie’s conversation reels from rhapsodies about how “blessed” she and her clients are to sassy capitalist mottoes: “Moving the merch! That’s what I’m all about.”

Stuever also got to hang out with the Trykoskis (Jeff and Bridgette), who erect one of those huge synchronized flashing light displays that attract visitors (and traffic) to the neighborhood from miles around. Possibly the most consistently gratified of all Stuever’s subjects, Jeff lives to construct this elaborate system, employing 50,000 lights and “$10,000 worth of sixteen-channel control boards” as well as a short-range FM transmitter so that spectators can tune their car radios to the soundtrack. (The song is “Wizards in Winter,” by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, a number Stuever describes as “‘Stairway to Heaven’ for the men of America who put tens of thousands of Christmas lights on their suburban homes and program them to blink to music.”) Hired to design the lights for the faux Main Street of a local New Urbanist development called Frisco Square, Jeff becomes so obsessed that by the end of the book he’s buying a shipping container filled with 27,000 sets of LED lights from a factory in China.

Lastly, Stuever spent time with Caroll Cavaso, a single mother of two who has to finance her family’s Christmases on a considerably tighter budget; he meets Caroll and her 10-year-old daughter, Marissa, in the line for that Black Friday doorbuster. Tagging along with her, he attends a megachurch, where the pastor “casts himself as a fast-quipping, badass warrior for Christ. He is not above driving a bulldozer on stage to make his point.” Frisco is crawling with this breed of preacher; Stuever dubs the typical specimen “Reverend True Religion Jeans” purveying “Venus-and-Mars-style jokes about women and men and relationships, with props. (Don’t you hate it when your wife puts the toilet paper on the roll backwards? Don’t you just sit there and say, ‘Help me Lord’?)”

Despite his own aversion to personality cults and self-help pieties, Stuever clearly likes and respects Caroll, who finds much comfort in her church. The “true openness” with which she welcomes the pastor’s nostrums and prefab pep talks moves him. He could be describing his position on Christmas as a whole when he writes, “I believe in little, except, strangely, I do believe in believers.”

Though largely immune to the Christmas spirit, Stuever really does like people, and his generosity and curiosity save “Tinsel” from becoming a bitter and all too familiar diatribe against suburban vacuity. He gets consulted by Tammie on whether a mantelpiece display looks better with two or three angels. (“You’re really starting to understand your garlands,” she tells him. “I need you … You’ve got the eye, mister.”) He sits in on a tense gift-opening session at the Trykoskis’ place. (Jeff’s mother objects to his insistence that “we have to be at our house for Christmas, because of the lights.”) He marvels as Caroll badly sprains both ankles while working as a stagehand on the megachurch’s Christmas pageant and her fellow congregation members respond with self-absorbed indifference.

Stuever may have grown up in a similar Middle American milieu (Oklahoma City), but he’s now a pop culture writer for the Washington Post’s Style section and, furthermore, gay — though if he ever told any of his sources this, he doesn’t convey their response. Instead, he endeavors to insert himself gamely but unobtrusively into the action, helping Jeff with the extension cords, sniffling over a local radio station’s mawkish “Christmas Wish” segments with Tammie and tagging along to the Junior League’s ‘Neath the Wreath holiday bazaar. (Cutesy names are as common as boob jobs in this town.) He’s there when Eitan, a young Israeli working a kiosk at the mall, witnesses the mob assembled for the opening of Santa’s Village: “It’s insane. I have never seen a Santa Claus. He is like Paris Hilton here.”

Stuever spends a lot of time wandering through the Stonebriar Centre mall, and confesses that he enjoys it. Where misanthropes see only a palace of conspicuous and wasteful consumption, Stuever also recognizes that the mall is a place where people gather and wander, sometimes without buying anything. They are “falling in love, or kissing a child … In this carbed-out consumerismo are places and moments of true bonding, places to be seen and to see others, to simply exist.”

This is not to say that Stuever doesn’t recognize the demented poignancy of our Christmas complex. One of the book’s most fetching moments comes when he ruminates on the avid collecting subculture that’s formed around a manufacturer of miniature villages called Department 56, whose products are all Dickensian Victoriana and Bavarian cottages with dollops of painted snow. Department 56 even has a “Christmas in the City” line (featuring the new Yankee Stadium!), but Stuever notes that they have “never issued a Christmas world that actually resembles our own” — by which he means suburbs like Frisco. “There is no ‘box-store village’ series in which to place that Starbucks next to the Chili’s and the FedEx Kinko’s, which could sit on zone ‘pads’ in front of a porcelain Super Target or 24-hour Wal-Mart … There is no tiny Tammie flying down a tiny Dallas North Tollway in her tiny Big Red filled with tiny tubs of tiny garlands.”

For Stuever, the “village making and controlled reality” coveted by Department 56 buffs is “a constant theme everywhere I go.” Frisco — most of which was built in the past decade — is a similarly manufactured environment, purportedly everything its residents want in life, yet not the community they choose when it’s time to construct the perfect Christmas town out of little china knickknacks. Without belaboring any of his points, Stuever gently unveils a place where, in celebrating their most iconic holiday, people long for a past that never existed, beguile each other with bogus sentimental yarns, scare themselves with the imaginary menaces lurking “outside” their sanctuary and try to retreat further into a safety that actually bores them stiff. That’s Christmas, American style: a gingerbread house too small and sweet to move into, but we keep trying all the same.

As Yagoda entertainingly demonstrates, none of the criticisms and debates about today’s memoirs are unprecedented. From the very beginning (if by the beginning you mean the “Confessions” of St. Augustine and “The Life of Benvenuto Cellini,” written in the 5th and 16th centuries, respectively), autobiography has been subject to attacks on its appropriateness and veracity. There was no blogosphere to accuse Cellini of being way too self-absorbed, or to fact-check the full extent of St. Augustine’s chastity, however, and by now their books are wrapped in the distinguished mantle of history. If you think that today’s memoirs are the last word in TMI, then consider the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, perhaps the most influential autobiographer of all time, who treated his shocked 18th-century readers to descriptions of his masturbatory practices and professions of his desire to be sexually dominated by “an imperious woman.”

And then there are the frauds. Yagoda notes that earlier generations of readers did not make the same distinction between fiction and nonfiction that we do now, but by the 19th century, they cared enough to object when someone presented himself as former captive of a Native American tribe, an escaped slave, or a sailor who survived a shipwreck off the coast of Africa when he was, in fact, not. The more polemically charged an autobiographical claim — the testimony of former slaves relating the abuse they suffered while in bondage, for example — the more likely it was to be challenged by political opponents (and defended by supporters). As controversial contemporary memoirists like Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu demonstrate, an autobiographer can expect rigorous scrutiny from those who don’t like what she has to say — as well as a lot of slack from those who do.

“All autobiographies are lies,” said George Bernard Shaw, and Yagoda concurs, to a degree. Pointing out that most of us can’t recall the exact words of conversations we had yesterday, let alone those of many years past, he writes, “all memoirs that contain dialogue — which is to say all recent and current memoirs — are inaccurate.” Nevertheless, this does not make them utterly false. Ideally, “the dialogue in a memoir is the author’s best-faith representation of what the people who were present could have/would have/might have said.” Complicating the matter is the growing body of evidence that even when people are trying their damnedest to recount the precise details of some recent experience — when they’re, say, testifying under oath in court — they get a lot of stuff wrong, often in a way that suits their own desires and needs. Unreliable and revisionist, memory, as Yagoda puts it, “is itself a creative writer.”

“Memoir: A History” offers a pleasant tour through the various manifestations of the form, with Yagoda pointing out landmarks and dropping the occasional witticism or pithy insight. Over there are the memoirs of religious faith and conversion — a major category — and over here are the sensational death-row confessions by criminals looking to parlay their notoriety into one final payday. Eighteenth-century women of easy virtue wrote titillating accounts of their lives and loves, an especially profitable enterprise if you charge former clients to have their names kept out of it. There was a brief vogue in the 19th century for anti-Catholic “exposés” of convent life, supposedly written by former nuns. There were the travel and adventure memoirs of the early 1900s, written by people like T.E. Lawrence, and, long before Studs Terkel, a spate of first-person oral histories recorded by journalists and relating the stories of ordinary citizens and workers. A particular breed of “light autobiography,” humorous and nostalgic depictions of American family life, flourished in the mid-20th century, but nowadays hardly anyone reads such titles as “The Egg & I,” “Cheaper by the Dozen,” and “My Sister Eileen.” (Although the branch library of my childhood was full of these books, and I loved them.)

With the 1960s, this brief sunny interlude of what Yagoda calls “normative memoirs” ended in a blaze of fiery truth-telling, led by African-Americans, whose literature is founded in the urgent need to testify to the reality of black lives. Yagoda persuasively argues that there’s a line of direct descent from, say, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” to “Girl, Interrupted” and the hundreds of memoirs about child abuse, incest, mental illness, addiction, cancer and other traumas that began to appear in the 1980s. The political imperative to “speak truth to power” segued into a widespread belief in the healthful effects of defying decorum to talk freely about what were once private horrors. (Interestingly, Yagoda notes that the “extreme misery memoir” is now even more popular in the U.K. than in the U.S., “a particular and somewhat alarming British taste, like Marmite or mushy peas.”)

For the most part, it’s hard to quarrel with “Memoir: A History,” but Yagoda does manage to slip a little controversy bait into an otherwise reasonable book. Behind much of the current kvetching about the memoir boom lies the impulse to protect the artistic supremacy of the novel. So when Yagoda writes,”fiction has become a bit like painting in the age of photography — a novelty item that has its place in the Booker Prize/Whitney Museum high culture and in the genre-fiction/black velvet-Elvis low but is oddly absent in the middle range,” he’s inviting trouble and knows it.

It’s true that material that writers would once have worked into fiction — classic autobiographical first novels like “The Bell Jar” or James Agee’s “A Death in the Family,” for example — will now more likely be presented as memoir. But whether such novels once occupied the whole extent of the middlebrow fictional spectrum between, say, a Booker Prize winner like Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” and a Tom Clancy thriller is debatable. Besides, “Atonement” was as successful as any memoir (and more successful than most). “The Lovely Bones” sold as well as “Eat Pray Love,” and probably to the same readers. Yagoda’s statement about memoir usurping the novel is the sort of thing people worried about the future of literary fiction seize upon in their frequent moments of hysteria, but — like a lot of the dicey memoirs he writes about — it has a tenuous connection to actual fact.

More truly provocative is Yagoda’s assertion that the rise of memoir shows how “authorship has been democratized”; everyone has a story to tell and who better to tell it than the one who lived it? We put less faith in expertise and objectivity, and more in what’s spoken “straight from the heart.” Furthermore the authenticity of a first-person account of a true story will, in many readers’ minds, make up for a lack of the literary finesse required in fiction. James Frey could not find a publisher for the preening, bombastic “A Million Little Pieces” when he first attempted to sell it as a novel; marketed as a memoir, it was a hit, and continued to sell well even after he was publicly disgraced for making up many of the book’s more melodramatic events.

In any given year since the blossoming of mass literacy in the 19th century, the selection of new books on the market consists of a handful of excellent works, a more sizable swath of total dreck and an ocean of the merely OK. For the past century and a half, the vast majority of merely OK authors have written novels, on the understanding that this is what serious writers ought to do. Readers liked the results more or less depending on the subject matter or style, but in general there was not a lot to distinguish these novels from each other, and in a few years they were utterly forgotten. This is the fiction that could now be losing ground to the memoir.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? As Yagoda writes, the memoir has an advantage over the novel in that “it is easier to do fairly well.” For mediocre writers, it is indeed a godsend, offering them not only a greater chance of publication but also a greater likelihood of producing a decent book. Yagoda calls this “a net plus for the cause of writing.” The one thing the memoir does lack is the literary novel’s aura of art, but a lot of the people now writing popular memoirs wouldn’t have been able to produce great novels anyway, and might have broken their hearts trying. Now, at least, they have a chance of winning some readers. Still, there’s a sense that the bar has been ignominiously lowered.

The celebrated Bosnian-American novelist Aleksandar Hemon spoke for the uneasiness caused by this state of affairs when, earlier this year, he told BookForum, “I hate confessional memoirs … Literature, to my mind, starts from some sort of personal space — and then it has to go beyond that. Whatever experience you may have had, whatever stories you might have to tell about yourself, they have to be transformed into something that’s meaningful beyond yourself. And because it’s transformed at some point, it stops being about you. The person in my fiction is not my life, so we can talk about it. If it were my life, what would you have to say about it? Memoir is not subject to interpretation. That is antithetical to literature. Confessional space is solipsistic: I’m the only one there, you don’t get to enter.”

In fact, the opposite is the case. It’s precisely when we are conscious of fictional characters as the invention of a literary author that they seem inert and fixed — solipsistic — to many readers, who usually don’t feel entitled to quibble with the exalted creator about his choices. By contrast, the characters and events in memoirs are often, like real people and events, the subjects of energetic controversy, which makes them seem more alive. Who was to blame for the author’s divorce? Was he justified in his rejection of 12-step programs? Was her mother bipolar, and how might her life have been different if she had been medicated? People who have read the same memoir can talk about this stuff for hours. The real world, after all, is available for an infinite range of interpretations, while we tend to see the products of the literary novelist’s imagination as admitting only a few, and most of those are likely to be detached and aesthetic rather than moral and immediate.

Both of these notions are illusions, of course. It’s not the made-up aspect of literary fiction that makes it seem marmoreal and remote — otherwise, millions of people wouldn’t be discussing the entirely fictional characters on “Lost” or “Mad Men” around the water cooler or in online forums. Children and adults would not have massed in bookstores at midnight to buy the latest Harry Potter installment. Those fictions — TV shows and children’s books — have, like the memoir, not yet acquired the official status of Art. As long as they remain at least a little disreputable, they are our size, and lovable. But make the memoir respectable, clear it of all the charges against it — of vulgarity and commercialism and calling too much attention to itself, as well as of fraud — and chances are that sooner or later we’ll get bored of it, too.

The answer is Ned Warren, a man nicknamed “the Godfather of Land Fraud.” Ed Lazar was killed while on the way to testify before a grand jury about his past business dealings with Warren, a defunct partnership he had long since had cause to regret. Born Nathan Waxman, Warren was an ex-con who’d served a stint in Sing Sing for mail fraud, but managed to gloss over his past when he relocated to Arizona. He accomplished this via assiduous applications of charm, influence and, above all, cash. The monthly payments he funneled to a real estate commissioner were of particular interest to the grand jury, but Warren had his fingers in countless pies, from vending machine distribution to nightclubs. His primary racket, however, was selling lots in substandard or effectively nonexistent subdivisions in the Arizona desert to people who regarded such purchases as investments. In a precursor to the current subprime mortgage crisis, Warren also bundled the loans his investors took out on the plots and resold them as securities.

How did Ed Lazar get mixed up with such a character and why did he allow himself to be implicated to the degree that Warren thought it was necessary to have him killed? This is the enigma that haunts Zachary Lazar, who can barely remember his father. Zachary interviewed his mother, his parents’ friends and business associates, other men caught up in Warren’s Byzantine web of corporations, as well as reporters and cops who tried to get to the bottom of it all. Documentation of Warren’s various frauds and crimes is extensive, in large part because of the Arizona Project, the work of a team of journalists who gathered to investigate the circumstances surrounding the car-bombing death of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles in 1976. (In his acknowledgments, Lazar calls the Project “a vivid reminder of the importance of newspapers.”)

Nevertheless, the facts do little to explain why Ed Lazar allowed himself to be gulled by Warren and implicated in his wrongdoings. Although “Evening’s Empire” is categorized as both memoir and true crime, much of the book reads like a novel and can’t possibly be rooted in documentary evidence. Zachary Lazar couldn’t know everything his father thought as he drove to meet Warren for the first time, or that Warren was wearing espadrilles during their poolside interview or that his little daughter made a “stiff pretend curtsy” when introduced to her father’s new accountant and future partner. The fleeting thoughts of Warren himself (who died in prison in the 1980s), as he roamed his modernist mountainside home, swirling a scotch and preparing to hang one of his associates out to dry, are available to no one. Yet all of this is depicted in “Evening’s Empire,” a book that Lazar freely admits is “a conjuration,” the result of his efforts to “imagine how things could have played out in rooms forty years ago, most of the players long since dead.”

He imagines a father chaffing at the limits of modest middle-class existence while surrounded by the high rollers and major players Warren introduced him to. Ed Lazar’s friends described him as “more adventurous” than the average accountant. He was caught up in the optimism of postwar America, announcing the launch of his real estate venture by stating “I’ve grabbed the brass ring” to a group watching the 1969 moon landing. Also, it was Phoenix, a Southwestern go-getter’s version of Polanski’s Chinatown, “a gaudy jumble of high and low, aspiration and bad taste” whose residents were forever explaining, “It’s the Wild West, anything goes.” Why shouldn’t a clever man like Ed Lazar nab his share? He surely must have known that the same thinking has led countless others to their downfalls, but he must have thought he was too smart to share their fate. And for a while, he was a millionaire. On paper.

Lax regulations and corrupt government officials made Arizona in the 1960s and early ’70s a gold mine for the likes of Warren, and an irresistible mecca for ambitious gangsters seeking opportunities outside the established crime hierarchies of Chicago and the Eastern seaboard. Warren knew these guys because he knew everyone, and when he wanted both Lazar and the crooked real estate commissioner eliminated, he turned to a hoodlum looking to advance his own stature in his own way. Zachary suspects that his father was killed not “for what he said, or even for what he might have said later, in further testimony.” He simply didn’t know that much. The police think Ed was killed to frighten other potential witnesses, but Zachary believes “they killed him to simply show they could do it,” a demonstration of power by the shadowy figures who “were all planning Phoenix.”

“Evening’s Empire” is a moody book, full of men in suits staring into the middle distance in empty rooms and negotiating the posh snake pits that are the restaurants frequented by a boomtown’s movers and shakers. The multiplication of Warren’s intrigues and a cumulative sense of doom supply its narrative drive. Ed Lazar walked into a trap when he got mixed up with Ned Warren, and at a certain point he surely realized that, feeling the walls close in as his paper millions evaporated. There’s a fatalistic, noirish atmosphere to this story, in no small part because we know how it will end, and realize that the interspersed photographs of one of Warren’s shabby housing developments will give way to shots of that terrible stairwell.

Yet if “Evening’s Empire” is the story of how one man’s life — not only the life he actually led, but the freer life he once hoped to lead — ended, it is also the story of how another man’s life began. In the impossible task of understanding how a decent father wound up “appearing in news stories as the ‘lieutenant’ to Ned Warren’s ‘Godfather,’” with a reporter in the parking lot at his funeral jotting down the license plate numbers to check for mob connections, there is the making of a novelist. Lazar writes that his father was “murdered twice” by such distortions. You can see how this might give him a sense of the power in the stories we tell about people, and a never-ending desire to tell truer, better stories of his own.

Ben Mercer, an Oxford scholar, comes to Greece to escape a wrecked marriage; his wife describes him as “a danger to her, body and soul,” for reasons not immediately revealed. Running low on money, he gets a job at a greasy spoon in an Athens suburb, where barely submerged resentments between native Greeks and Albanian immigrants seem about to brim over into violence. Then Eberhard, a college acquaintance, turns up at one of his tables and mentions working at an excavation in Laconia, otherwise known as Lacedaemonia, the location of the ancient city-state of Sparta. Although Eberhard tries to discourage him, Ben’s imagination has been ignited. The severity of Sparta’s ethos has always fascinated him, as has the elusiveness of its material remains. Unlike the Athenians, “the Spartans left nothing behind that reflected their greatness. They had become no more than rumors of rumors in the histories of others … Each outsider contradicting the next, a chain of Mediterranean whispers.”

Archaeologists like to dig stuff up, of course, dragging to the surface of the earth things that have lain beneath it for centuries. Some of those things, Hill suggests, might be better left buried. Having finagled his way into a job at the dig, Ben finds his curiosity further inflamed by a clique among the site’s workers, three men (including Eberhard) and two women who form a seemingly impenetrable social unit. Deflecting the friendly overtures of other team members, Ben yearns first to be included and later to know just what this little group is hiding up in the hills.

The story of Ben’s gradual insinuation into the clique alternates with the notes he’s writing “towards” his thesis. The theme of these notes drifts from the enigma of the Spartans, whose refusal to speak for themselves permitted a thousand stories about them to flourish, to ruminations on the connection between love and ruthlessness (exemplified by the unparalleled unity of the Theban Sacred Band, a military force made up of 150 homosexual couples), to, finally, the riddles posed by his new friends. He begins an affair with one of the women and joins the group on a midnight jackal hunt, but never feels as if he’s penetrated to the heart of their mystery.

What’s really going on with Eberhard & Co. turns out to be just barely plausible … well, maybe not quite that, but what Hill does with it and the ancient history it invokes is hypnotic. The policies of the Spartan elite — who annually declared war against the captive majority of their population (called helots) so that these serflike non-citizens could be murdered at will without any loss of honor — feeds into questions of modern-day political expedience, extremism and the power of fear. What crimes can be justified in the pursuit of a noble ideal? Odd anecdotes — about a discarded doll ripped open to reveal a music-box “heart” and a fetal chicken found in a cracked egg — mirror disturbing discoveries at the site and in a cave, which in turn echo the descent into the underworld made by so many mythical heroes. Do monsters await in the bowels of the earth, or in ourselves?

Novelists have been attempting this sort of thing since John Fowles’ “The Magus”; what distinguishes “The Hidden” is both a clarity of purpose (the resolution is not excessively coy or ambiguous) and radiant prose. Hill’s style is the opposite of the description-clogged, obscurantist verbiage that most poets produce when turning to fiction. Instead, he brings to this novel the kind of metaphor so good you don’t savor it so much as shiver with instantaneous recognition. “There was a delicacy to his sanity he had never acknowledged before,” he writes of Ben at one point. “It was as frail as water tension.” How is it, I thought after reading this line, that we don’t already compare the stability of a fragile mind to the thin skin of water that keeps a teardrop together?

A pity then, that — no doubt due to the expediencies of paperback publication — “The Hidden” shows signs of lax editing (the novel could easily lose 30 pages and be strengthened by the cuts) and sloppy copyediting (multiple typos and unconverted British spellings like “realise”). Still, the same criticisms could be leveled at Irving’s interminable “Last Night in Twisted River,” a book that evidences far less thought and artistry. In a season of high-profile novels, “The Hidden” is in danger of living up to its name, and that would indeed be a crime.