Brigitte Aubert’s Death From the
Woods, which was recently translated
from the French, is a good example of a
book to read for the journey. Winner of
the 1997 Grand Prix de Litterature
Policiere, it has the perfect heroine.
Elise Andrioli is beautiful, funny and
brave. And blind, mute and quadriplegic.
The book reads like romantic suspense
from 30 years ago, with the finely tuned
hysteria of an Ursula Curtiss mystery.
Odd threats are suggested. Everyday
events hint at unspecified horrors.
Paranoia has seeped into the prose until
it is inseparable from it.

Of course, in this day and age a writer
couldn’t get away with such skittishness
in a full-facultied woman. In real life
most people are still spooked when a
back door slams suddenly, but on the
page women can coolly fight off assaults
that would have left the old 50-Foot
Woman bleating for mercy. Make the
heroine a blind, mute quadriplegic,
though, and every little twanging of the
nerve will make perfect sense. She can
be brave just sitting in the passenger
seat.

Elise has been incapacitated by the
terrorist bomb that killed her fianci,
and, her movie theater sold, she has
retreated to a Parisian suburb, where
she is cared for by her longtime
housekeeper, Yvette. One day Yvette
leaves her sitting in her wheelchair
outside a supermarket to catch the sun.
There a disturbed little girl who calls
herself Virginie tells Elise she saw
“Death from the Woods” kill a boy who
has been missing for a few days. That
afternoon Elise hears her physical
therapist tell Yvette that the boy has
been found, strangled.

It is hard to imagine a situation that
could intrinsically arouse more
curiosity. Since the story is confined
to Elise’s point of view, what is going
on is always open to at least some
doubt. Elise’s encounter with Virginie
sends her into a whole new circle of
people she must learn about in her
strange, new, limited way. One man
declares his love for her. Huh?
We may be in love with her, but
then we know her. It is perfectly in
keeping with the tone that another
recently acquired friend eventually
turns out to be an impostor. Like
Virginie, adults confide a lot in Elise
(shades of “The Heart Is a Lonely
Hunter”), but the only way she can
respond is to raise an index finger. Ah!
That finger! It is truly eloquent. And
funny. How can it be funny? Yet it is.

The uncertainty of not knowing whether
everyday details of life are threats is
far more frightening than a sudden,
bloody-knifed attack. Aubert is free to
take full advantage of this
circumstance, and she does. She
shamelessly chases suspense. I am always
suspicious when reviewers talk of
“nail-biting” and the like. (Someone
should do a study of whether such
descriptions have tapered off with the
widespread use of Prozac-type drugs.)
Still, when Elise regains consciousness
toward the end of the book in an unknown
place with no clue as to who or what is
beside her, it is one scary moment.

A lesser (or greater) writer would let
the grimness of the subject guide the
book. Aubert never does. Her book is
wonderfully sly, and Elise’s narrative
is an expert mix of wryness and tension.
At one point she thinks she is trapped
with Virginie in her dead fiancé’s
apartment by the still unknown murderer:

She comes to my side. I hear
her nimble little fingers feeling around
for the bolt. Okay, she’s pulling it,
but what’s she doing now? Virginie! I
don’t hear her anymore. Virginie, where
are you? This is no time to play
hide-and-seek. There’s nothing but
furtive sounds. I take a breath and
slowly count to twenty. I hear her
moving to my right, coming toward the
wheelchair. Is this a new game? The
worst thing about not being able to
speak is not being able to yell at
people, getting in their face and
barking, giving orders, insulting them.
What I really miss is insulting people.
Ah! There’s an inrush of air to my
right. Well, in any case, the door’s
opening and –

The climax itself seems interminable,
however, and once the explanation
begins, the mind boggles. Oh, the
identity of the murderer — which for
obvious reasons Elise hears about rather
than divines — is reasonable enough.
The reader will probably guess it, but
remember, you’re not supposed to pick
this book for its solution.

Still, you have to go through dozens of
pages of gobbledygook in the closing
chapters: bogus psychiatric analyses,
who thought what when, what was a
coincidence and what wasn’t, etc., etc.
This astonishingly jury-rigged nonsense
is the result of Aubert’s having
sacrificed everything to keep you
turning the pages. The ride, I must say,
is fabulous, but you may find you have
to pay too high a price for it.

- – - -
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Moment of Truth, by Lisa
Scottoline, has the opposite problem,
which is the more common one. Because
mysteries by definition require a
question and an answer, many writers
think that by simply supplying a
plausible answer they’ve got the whole
problem licked. The problem for the
reader is: Will the sometimes tedious
journey through fairly indifferent prose
pay off in the end? Here the committed
reader of mysteries is the most hopeful
specimen of humankind. Time and time
again you are disappointed, but memories
of the one purely satisfying solution
you read — when? your sophomore year in
college? — keep you reaching for more.

I look for certain tip-offs.
“Surprising” in a blurb on the back
cover is good; “twisty” or
“Hitchcockian” is better. (For some
reason People magazine is especially
reliable in this regard. Its writers
have a good eye for a fake-out.) I also
have learned to trust certain authors;
that’s one reason series are so
important to the genre. You can check
out the prose to make sure it’s
readable, but there is no way you can
check out a possible surprise ending
without ruining it. So you get to know
who’s going to come through.

Lisa Scottoline generally does, which is
what kept me going through most of her
new novel. The lack of suspense here was
uncharacteristically extreme, even
wondrous. A man comes home and finds his
loathsome wife murdered. He suspects his
already victimized daughter and so
decides to confess to the crime himself.
About 200 pages pass as his lawyer and
the justice system catch up to what we
knew from the beginning. Then, at the
end, firecrackers: The reader is treated
to a truly nice double-twist. It is hard
to imagine, in fact, how such an
interesting murderer could be attached
to such a dull narrative. But Scottoline
may have gotten herself too far in debt
to us for the payoff to be worth it.

- – - -
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Deep South, by Nevada Barr, is
not quite so misshapen. Like
Scottolines latest, this book is much
better at the end than through the body,
although the disparity in this case is
not as great. Barr tries to increase the
journey’s interest by describing the
workplace tensions and accommodations of
the heroine and her investigative team
– making it a sort of police procedural
of the emotions.

Park Ranger Anna Pigeon, a transplanted
Westerner new to Mississippi, has to
deal with obstreperous underlings who
don’t want to be bossed by a woman, with
her growing feelings for the local
sheriff and with one dead and disfigured
teenage girl. Barr has the confidence to
let Pigeon be unlikable (she says she
doesn’t like children, for instance,
while contemplating the corpse), and as
a result we like this character all the
more. But the situations and the other
characters are pretty much pro forma, so
I was pleasantly surprised by the
solution, which is clever and perfectly
fair. A lot of what looks like local
color — and feels a little too
researched — is actually key
information that takes on importance in
the final chapters.

Because of the relatively sensible
proportion of story to ending, “Deep
South” is probably the most competent of
the three works I’ve considered here –
if competence is what you’re looking for
in a mystery. I’m not sure I am.

The court — like that quintessential ’90s vehicle, the SUV — is where vague notions of adventure can intersect with making it big time. If the lawyer’s cause is just and its success depends on his success, there is bound to be some confusion between doing good and doing well — a confusion that is readily embraced in these stock-enhanced times.

That said — and I’ve said far worse — I should add that I love the genre. The arcane rules! The wiliness! The chicanery! Still, I’m surprised at how many people are writing these things. Although the monetary rewards can be great — John Grisham’s glow could not be more golden — the form is one of the most rigid I know. A trial is a trial; every reader is familiar with its shape. A defense attorney, a prosecutor, the accused, a judge, some witnesses: The cast of characters is as inflexible and unwieldy as the court building itself. (Civil cases are the exception.) It is a rare legal thriller that does not feature the defense attorney as the hero. Vogues in murderers come and go (for a while the judge was popular), but in the end you’re still stuck with the same old cast members. Fooling with the witnesses can at least give you some elbow room, and three new mysteries pay special attention to them.

In “Nothing but the Truth” John Lescroart, the most flavorful of legal-thriller writers, starts off in happily predictable fashion. Ditmas Hardy, his hard-drinking defense attorney, is in court while three cases are summarily dealt with: comedy, tragedy, triumph. Bam, bam, bam. Then Hardy’s office calls: His wife has not picked up the kids at school. Now that we have seen the court process from the outside, we move to the inside. The point of view switches to the wife, who has been called in front of a grand jury. The assistant district attorney bullies her; she keeps saying she has to go get her children; he misleads her; she in fact does know something about a friend she has promised not to reveal; the ADA sneers and insinuates; she loses her temper and ends up in jail.

Robert Benchley once wrote an essay in which he fantasized about being a successful witness. When the opposing attorney snidely cross-examines him, he maintains his composure with just enough irony to amuse the judge. This fantasy must be all the more prevalent now, thanks to “Court TV”: How would I do up there on the witness stand? As an answer, what happens to Hardy’s wife emerges full-blown from a nightmare.

It is a smart way to start a legal thriller. Rich or poor, people caught up in murder cases do not seem “like us.” This woman’s experience is so immediately engaging that it gives credence to Lescroart’s less-familiar-feeling scenes.

The book is set in San Francisco, but it would fit easily into the Boston that produced Edwin O’Connor’s “The Last Hurrah” and James Carroll’s “The City Below.” Lescroart always gives the sense of a society teeming with civil servants of various temperaments and ethnic backgrounds. Every once in a while a politician or two get thrown up out of the murk. There are, among others, a Jewish African-American head of homicide, a liberal Irish candidate for governor, a sexually frustrated corporate VP, an understanding bartender, a broken-down but invaluable old alcoholic attorney, lots more cops and lawyers and assorted scheming lobbyists.

The plot concerns gasoline additives. It turns out you don’t need them. Unfortunately, this revelation comes in a passage that seems to be italicized solely to indicate lazy storytelling. But aside from that lapse the narrative moves along at a nice jog-trot. Lescroart is a very loose, baggy writer. He is shrewd yet generous. He can actually get inside a lot of different characters and has the gift of making more than one of them look in the right at the same time. He is great fun to read. In other words, you can tell he’s not a lawyer.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – — – — – — – — – — -

Barry Siegel’s world is much narrower and drier, filled with moral quandaries that can be a bit obscure to the layperson. He makes you relieved that you are a layperson, in fact, and can just come out and say what you think.

In Siegel’s fiction, words not uttered — on or off the stand — are more important than those that are. Where “Nothing but the Truth” is immediately anchored by the wife’s distress, Siegel’s latest novel, “Actual Innocence,” is haunted by an earlier quandary of defense attorney Greg Monarch’s. In a gas station parking lot, a psychopathic killer had told Monarch he’d murdered a 7-Eleven clerk, and Monarch had approached the DA, without revealing any names, to arrange for the man’s commitment to a mental hospital. But the DA, interested solely in a prosecutable case and counting on Monarch’s desire to get this lunatic off the streets before he killed again, wouldn’t agree, leaving Monarch paralyzed: He could not violate attorney-client privilege, however the relationship had come about.

In Siegel’s previous mystery, “Perfect Witness,” the eponymous witness carries the plot on her strong, lively, devious, sociopathic back. The book is thoughtful and twisty — surprisingly poised for a fiction debut. In “Actual Innocence,” the female-trickster role is divided between two women: a tough-old-gal witness and a convicted murderer awaiting execution who just happens to be an old girlfriend of our hero’s — a girlfriend he had for three years, who was driven insane by the urge to write and ended up waving a knife in front of a cat. The book is handicapped right off by this sillier premise.

The best sections are on how evidence can be cooked up — and how it can stay cooked despite a lot of good intentions. Like Lescroart, Siegel tells his story from different points of view, but the effect is more committeelike than societal. He is, however, better than Lescroart at hinting around at, and then explaining, the environmental hanky-panky that gives the book its up-to-date feel. “Actual Innocence” is clumsier than “Perfect Witness.” But it will still encourage those who are always on the lookout for another legal-thriller writer one can actually read. (Sometimes I suspect that publishing houses will put out anything with a legal term on its title page. If you don’t believe me, take a look at Brad Meltzer’s latest.)

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – — – — – — – — – — -

In Steve Martini’s new book, “The Attorney” (huh? as if any of his many other books featuring Paul Madriani couldn’t have been called that), the cross-examination of our hero’s girlfriend occurs later on in the book. She is the director of an agency that investigates child abuse, and she has given him confidential information concerning an accusation against a client. We’ve all been trained to accept egregious violations of rules, especially in dutifully commercial plots like this one, so it’s nice to see some consequences for a change. And certainly there is energy in Martini’s very colloquial present-tense narrative. But the writing is awkward. Worse, the setup feels very strained. I know a legal thriller is supposed to be preposterous, and I don’t mind when some of the seams show, but I don’t want the buttons popping off and hitting me in the eye.

“Blood Money” introduces a super-accountant for the Mafia called Bernie “the Elephant” Lupus who has been kept a virtual prisoner in a secluded compound by a beach for years. After he fakes his death, he and his young housekeeper end up with Whitefield. Lupus has been keeping in his head records of investments for the major New York, Pittsburgh, Boston, New Jersey, Chicago and New Orleans crime families, and he is now the only one who knows where billions of dollars of mob money is. He and Whitefield, with the help of a fellow who has similarly fantastical financial skills, plan to give the money to charity, which is, of course, a lot more complicated than it sounds.

I love the Jane Whitefield books, and “Blood Money” is as fast-paced and readable as any, but it is, unfortunately, not quite up to the high standards Perry has led us to expect. His mistake is to spend too much of his narrative time with a capo named Delfina, one of the many mobsters whose money is being given away. Unlike the other families’ operations, Delfina’s is scattered across the United States, and he and his men move constantly. Although his analyses of situations are sophisticated, they often sound like pale versions of Whitefield’s. As the “Godfather” and “Goodfellas” era melts into the “Sopranos” sunset, you’ve got to give us more than that.

Outcast, by Jose Latour, starts out in Cuba and ends up in Miami. To be more specific about how this shift occurs would neutralize the first of the many about-faces that the plot takes. Latour is a Cuban crime writer who still lives in Cuba, but “Outcast” is written in English. The combination may be what makes Latour sound so authoritative about both shores.

His hero, Eliot Steil, is the product of a Cuban mother and an American father whose business kept him in Cuba for a while and whose obsession with a shrewd, coldhearted Cajun later kept him away. As the book begins, Steil the son is working as an English teacher in Havana. There he appears to be a bit of a sad sack, but when he reaches Florida, he turns out to have many Felix Krull-like qualities; presumably the United States releases them in him. He is soon getting ahead thanks to deals with one corrupt cop and various criminals, all of whom come in handy when he tries to figure out why an American stranger would have come out of the blue to kill him before he reached the States.

Latour’s tone is fascinating. Crime novels tend to be either moralistic or hiply amoral with a satiric or leering edge. Latour’s vision is amoral, but matter-of-factly so. To him it makes perfect sense that a man who would become an English teacher in Cuba would become a thief in Miami. And Latour’s criminals may not have hearts of gold, but they don’t go around killing or double-crossing one another, either. They’re businessmen — very curious (and persuasive) Cuban versions of what businessmen must be.

The one drawback is all the detail about the characters’ pasts that is not essential to the plot. There is really too much of it for genre fiction. But the prose is surprisingly smooth. It is Latour’s dispassionate eye, not his language, that gives him away as a foreigner.

In the ’80s, when drugs and immigration problems convulsed Miami, Edna Buchanan was famous for her police-beat coverage in the Miami Herald. In her 1987 memoir, “The Corpse Had a Familiar Face,” she described interviewing a woman who became sexually excited as she stabbed a Miami Beach retiree 56 times — and as she went over the details later in loving detail. Although the interview took place in prison, Buchanan was shaken by the killer’s sexual advances.

She creates a similar character in her latest Britt Montero mystery, Garden of Evil. Halfway through the book, serial killer Keppie Travis takes the Edna Buchanan-like Montero hostage and proceeds to drive up and down Florida, enticing and then shooting men, painting her nails and guzzling tequila without apparent ill effect, talking about herself and her feelings all the while.

Buchanan has become a much more facile writer since her memoir, which manages to persuade amply despite lurching along to choppy newspaper rhythms. You cannot come away from it without suspecting that she may be the coolest, toughest person who ever lived. The mystery feels hollow in comparison. There are a couple of splendid scenes — one in particular when Travis and Montero listen to a traffic helicopter’s fitful coverage of the police pursuit of their car. It may be the most bitingly accurate (and funny) depiction of that kind of journalism I have ever read. And clearly Buchanan knows her female psycho killers. But the broad outlines of the plot could have been lifted from a TV show, and the killer sometimes sounds a bit too much like another female character in the book, Montero’s down-home brassy photographer friend. Some might say the one offsets the other. To me it looks like not enough colors in the palette.

The characters in Christina Garcia-Aguilera’s A Miracle in Paradise are, by Floridian standards, remarkably stationary. But the Cuban-Americans’ keen sense of displacement suffuses the book. Lupe Solano, the private investigator who has also appeared in Garcia-Aguilera’s other three mysteries, is tapped by a local mother superior to investigate reports that a certain statue of the virgin will shed real tears on Cuban independence day. This event is supposedly going to have deep political repercussions, none of which are made very clear.

The plot of the book and Garcia-Aguilera’s discussions of politics share a similar murkiness. They manage somehow to be both rudimentary and perplexing, which is too bad. The Cuban-American variety of right-winger is an interesting one, and I’m sorry I didn’t get a better look at a few.

At one point Solano reveals that her sister, who is a nun, wears a bra and panties from Victoria’s Secret under her dark-blue habit. It is hard to tell what to make of this information. Although Solano’s tone is wry, her statement does not seem to reflect a broad church lady-type humor. She is very Catholic, and her satire is limited. She says early on that all Catholic clergy can assess a person’s bank account at a single glance, a statement that may be amusing but also can be seen as literal. So are nuns actually allowed to have charge accounts at Victoria’s Secret these days? Or if that’s a bit much, maybe Bloomingdales? Solano doesn’t seem to be criticizing her sister for irreverence or self-indulgence. Nor does she seem to be congratulating her on her rebelliousness. Perhaps this is just another case of mindless consumer humor, with no more meaning than an advertisement has.

I do not like trying to figure out whether an author’s mistakes are deliberate or not. I do not like timetables or floor plans. I do not want to have to pay attention to who calls whom what, where who was when or who knew what too soon. That is the author’s job, and I do not feel like doing it for the author. I do not want my mysteries to feel like work.

Besides, you have to suspend so much disbelief to read a mystery novel that picking apart minor breaks in logic threatens to topple the whole edifice. (See Raymond Chandler’s much-quoted, perfectly just yet irrelevant objection to one of Agatha Christie’s solutions: so ingenious that “only a half-wit could guess it.”)

Christie, like the other Golden Age detective novelists, is supposed to be good at clues. You know the drill: a genteel setting, a limited cast, a few pretty corpses and a final gathering of suspects at which the detective explains how the indentation in the corner of the rug led him to the murderer. In truth, the best Christies follow this pattern in only the most superficial sense. They do not depend on clues but on perfectly fair conjurer’s tricks: Christie is an absolute genius at making you look elsewhere while the answer is right there in plain sight. That is one reason she is still read eagerly today while contemporaries like Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham are largely forgotten.

Christie’s many fans were no doubt happy to learn that the writer, who died in 1976, has in the past two years started to publish anew. This return is thanks to Charles Osborne, a literary jack-of-all-trades, who has turned two of her plays into novels. The results are mixed. His efforts are certainly more successful than Robert Goldsborough’s attempts to channel the dead Rex Stout — the dialogue and structure are, after all, Christie’s — but there are difficulties in such a literal translation of a play. It is extremely odd to read an entire novel without modernist literary pretensions that is set in a single room. The prose sandwiched between the dialogue often reads like stage directions. And some of it will make your eyes roll back in your head.

“The Unexpected Guest,” the most recent of these novelizations, starts out well. A man abandons a disabled car, peers through the French doors of a nearby house and finds a lovely young woman standing over a corpse in a wheelchair. She is holding a recently fired gun. When he quizzes her, she is ironical. Yes, that was her husband. He was cruel! He drank! She’s hated him for years! But the stranger is smitten; he goes into action — fooling with the evidence, coaching her on what to say, manufacturing an alibi for her. It’s fun to watch the clues being manhandled in this fashion, and fun to watch them unravel. But the rest of the cast is less interesting, despite the presence of a slippery candidate for Parliament. The dead tyrant’s idiot brother is especially tiresome. I would be surprised if any veteran mystery reader did not immediately pick out the killer.

Despite its lack of a bang-up beginning, “Black Coffee” is probably the better book. It takes place at the country house of a “leading scientist of the day,” who asks the famed Hercule Poirot to safeguard a weapons formula from some unknown member of his large household. When the old gentleman is poisoned, the suspects include his breezy young niece, his spinster sister, his trusted secretary, his ne’er-do-well son, the son’s beautiful Italian wife and a mysterious stranger named Dr. Carelli who claims to know her. The plot pretty much proceeds as you would expect, given this assortment of types. There are a few pallid reversals along the way. Early on, the spinster magnanimously tries to comfort the Italian wife for missing the sunny climes of her native land, which the young woman actually loathes. There are also, unfortunately, clues: A tin case of drugs has no dust on it.

What saves the novel is the ingenuousness of its atmosphere, which is straight from Christie. When the breezy niece teases Poirot’s sidekick, Col. Hastings, about his old-fashioned rectitude, the whole exchange is sweetly old-fashioned itself. Even during her heyday, Christie was describing a world fast disappearing — as she often reminded us. Her two most successful detectives, Poirot and Miss Marple, were old at the beginning of their 40-year-plus reign. (Poirot dates back to 1920, Miss Marple to 1930.)

The Victorian coziness Christie details is what Christmas is supposed to feel like. The day never lives up to these expectations, of course, making the corpses of family members strewn through the pages all the more welcome. There are few things as satisfying as reading about the horrible death of a tyrannical patriarch after partaking of a real-life Christmas dinner with just the family. But you’re better off trying a real Christie than a Charles Osborne version. And there are probably a few old paperbacks of hers tucked away wherever you’ve landed for the holidays.

For the setting alone, you might try “Hercule Poirot’s Christmas,” in which such a patriarch gathers together various quarreling offspring for the first time in years. Naturally he ends up a bloody pulp. This book is a perfect example of how limiting clues can be. The puzzle is built very cleverly — certainly it is the most successful of her mysteries so constructed — but there is a resulting murkiness that is not found in her truly top-notch work. (All those men stroking their jaws! Throwing back their heads to laugh! You mean those were clues? And here I thought it was just the limited nature of the Christie style.)

My favorites are “Crooked House” and “There Is a Tide.” A theater-reviewer friend likes “The Hollow” best. My cookbook-editor friend admires “Towards Zero” and “Murder in Retrospect.” All of these books are classics. (I am confining myself here to the first American titles. Christie’s mysteries have more assumed names than most criminals.) The prose is as easy to swallow as a nice cup of tea, and there are little O. Henry-type dramas along the way to amuse and distract you: One uncommunicative man in “There Is a Tide” assumes his wife married him for his respectable station in life, only to discover when he loses it that her feelings run deeper.

Instead of clues, we get a more seamless sort of information. Poirot tells us again and again in “Crooked House” what type of person kills: someone who boasts about it later. Christie trots out a character who exactly fits the description, but because of this person’s position in the story, the possibility of guilt never occurs to us. Then the author reaches out to give the setup a single, graceful tug, and all of the game pieces turn over to form one recognizable pattern.

In setting up her schemes, Christie is ruthless. Ruthless with her characters: One reason she sent Colonel Hastings off to Argentina in mid-career is that giving Poirot a sidekick encumbered her — she couldn’t make him the murderer. Ruthless with romantic expectations: Love, like evidence, is often simply a matter of which way you’re looking. And ruthless with reality: It obviously matters not an iota to her whether murderers actually boast a lot. Because each element of the novels is detached from everything but its place in the puzzle, the stories take on a really delightful suppleness and sinuousness. Her world was thoroughly made up from the beginning; in that sense it can never grow stale.

As you look through the cache of old Christie paperbacks, remember this: Pass up the thrillers; avoid the young sleuths Tommy and Tuppence at all costs; don’t read anything written after 1963 except “Endless Night.” And have yourself a murderous little Christmas.

R.D. Zimmerman’s new mystery novel, “Innuendo,” deals with the possible homosexuality of a very big, very married movie star. Even I, as sketchily informed as I am about such matters, had no trouble figuring out which Hollywood actor inspired the portrait. The murder of a gay runaway is thrown in to provide the narrative.

“Innuendo” is the latest installment in Zimmerman’s Todd Mills series. Mills is a formerly closeted, now proudly gay investigative reporter for a TV station in Minneapolis. The movie star, Tim Chase, is in town to film a movie about AIDS after suing a tabloid over allegations that he had abandoned a longstanding gay lover and winning $8.5 million, thus “vindicating” his sexuality, according to a spokesperson.

The book’s prologue, in which the victim, post coitus, stares “into the eyes of the stunning man who’d just taken him to the stars and back,” is not overly promising. And too much of the beginning is devoted to showing how any of the male characters could be the killer — the star, Mills’ new cop boyfriend and a number of others. At first the plot threatens to remain a simple eeny-meeny-miny-mo. But it does eventually thicken, and the solution manages to be a neat twist on the very contemporary themes of outing and coverup.

Zimmerman walks a fine line here. He could have killed his story right off the bat by making Chase too obviously unsympathetic — or too obviously anything. Zimmerman, however, is good at capturing the odd pocket of happiness in the Chase household. Despite the occasional preposterousness of the flirtation that may or may not be happening between Todd Mills and Tim Chase (names that belong in a porn movie), the star’s troubling charm does come across.

When you read the book, it is hard not to picture the actual man Chase is loosely based on. In this way, Zimmerman is both outing him and expressing sympathy for his fear of outing, a kind of irony that ends up being not a whole lot more complicated than a story in People magazine. Like that magazine, the book would be far less interesting if it were less timely, but so what? Just don’t wait 10 years to read it.

Last month, a New York Times article called “A Changing South Revisits Its Unsolved Racial Killings” included a discussion of the little-known car bombing of Wharlest Jackson in Natchez, Miss., which is clearly the inspiration for Greg Iles’ new mystery, “The Quiet Game.” The novel’s hero, Penn Cage, sounds suspiciously like a mint-julep version of Scott Turow — a prosecutor turned writer of bestselling legal thrillers, one of which is called “Presumed Guilty.” Cage returns to his hometown of Natchez and discusses the 25-year-old unsolved murder of a black Korean war vet with a comely young newspaper publisher. (The real-life murder took place in ’67, but Iles changes the date to coincide with the surge of support for Bobby Kennedy in the ’68 presidential race. That’s a hint of the many far-reaching complications to come.)

When the newspaper runs an article on Cage’s remarks, everyone assumes that he has started his own investigation, which of course he eventually does. The book starts very slowly, with a lot of different characters and quandaries to introduce — an unusually large number for a mystery — and Iles is not good at catching a reader’s interest in any low-key way. It’s enough to make you suspect that at the heart of any mystery there’s a very bad conventional novel struggling to get out.

But Iles is quite good — if a bit redundant — when the action picks up. Where earlier you felt forced to trudge and trudge across a sodden field, you are now flying head over heels down a steep slope, words slipping past you, over and under, around and about. Characters pop in and out; possible explanations come into focus, blur, then come back into focus; facts repeatedly regroup. What actually may be struggling to get out here is a book that’s about a hundred pages shorter.

Fictional rewrites of true-to-life situations pose obvious difficulties. For one thing, it’s easy to lose the suspense. The “Innuendo” twist is a fair answer to the problem of how to provide the requisite surprise at the end of a relatively well-traveled path. “The Quiet Game,” however, is another matter. The real Natchez murder is still officially unsolved, but there has never been any doubt that it was racially motivated. Iles’ little sleight of hand makes race play only an indirect role in the killing. This solution is not surprising, only annoying; to leave race on the front burner would not have changed the plot complications a bit — believe me, I’m giving nothing away — and it seems sacrilegious to rewrite history this way. Wharlest Jackson, after all, was a real martyr to a real cause, and to minimize that martyrdom, even in part, is simply not an interesting turn of the screw.

A footnote: These two media-savvy authors expect a similar level of saturation in their readers. Both briefly offer up a possible parent-child incest scenario; Iles, the more flat-footed, even refers to “Chinatown,” while Cage talks himself into the theory. But such incest has so saturated popular culture that it is now nothing more than another expectation to overturn, and both writers have fun teasing us with it.

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One of the least satisfying entries in “The Best American Mystery Stories 1999″ is the most topical: Joseph Hansen’s “Survival,” in which a private investigator reminiscent of the precancerous Marlboro Man stumbles upon a white supremacist group living in the woods of Northern California. There are no surprises, just a contrast between what is supposed to be a “real” Westerner and these narrow-minded zealots.

But most of the stories in this collection, which was guest-edited by police proceduralist Ed McBain, are very fine indeed. I have always liked short mystery stories for their purity: At their best, they are distilled plot. A standout here is Tom Franklin’s “Poachers.” In this thick slice of Southern Gothic, the brooding gloom of the woods never obscures the narrative itself. I didn’t even mind the graduates of the Elmore Leonard School for Hip Hit Men who populate Lawrence Block’s “Heller’s Last Refuge,” Jeffrey Deaver’s “Wrong Time, Wrong Place” and Victor Gischler’s “Hitting Rufus” — though these characters are so articulate, levelheaded and genial that it’s hard to imagine mystery stories based any less on real life.