Victorian Venice to Turtle Bay

As a rule, historical mysteries aren’t my favorites, but last June I picked up “Pentecost Alley,” the most recent in Anne Perry’s Victorian series starring Thomas Pitt, a gamekeeper’s son turned police superintendent, and Charlotte, his well-born wife. I was so beguiled by the lost world of withdrawing rooms, hansom cabs and handsome parlor maids that I refused to return to the 20th century for the next three months. Fortunately for my escapist tendencies, Perry writes two books a year: The riveting “Pentecost Alley” was the 16th Pitt outing and her newest, Weighed in the Balance, is the seventh in a darker series featuring William Monk, an arrogant, angst-ridden, semi-amnesiac private detective. (He lost most of his memory in a carriage accident in the first book but has convenient and dramatic flashbacks.)

Monk solves crimes with the help of Sir Oliver Rathbone, a brilliant barrister, and Hester Latterly, a fiercely moral, pig-headed nurse who learned her profession on the battlefields of the Crimean War, with Florence Nightingale. This time, Sir Oliver agrees to defend the flamboyant Countess Zorah Rostova on a slander charge. The countess has publicly accused Princess Gisela--the Wallis Simpson of her day--of murdering her husband, Prince Friedrich, heir to an obscure German principality who gave up his throne for love.

Monk is dispatched to the Continent to gather evidence among the hedonistic exiled nobility who lost their thrones in the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. I swiftly tired of the lush descriptions of Venice under Austrian occupation and was relieved when Monk returned to London, where the crafty Hester was busy meddling in her latest patient’s life. The book improves enormously once Sir Oliver goes to court, and the denouement is unexpected and ingenious.

What sets Harlan Coben above the crowd are wit and wicked nonchalance about jettisoning reality to create an entertaining plot. In Fade Away, Myron Bolitar, his sports agent detective, is placed on an NBA basketball team, the New Jersey Dragons, in order to locate a superstar guard who has disappeared. Granted, 10 years ago, Myron was a first-round draft choice of the Celtics but, alas, suffered a devastating knee injury in a preseason game that ended his career.

Myron has since gone to Harvard Law School, worked undercover for the FBI, solved a couple mysteries and consumed umpteen cases of Yoo-Hoo--a resume that makes a professional comeback, even as a bench-warmer, unlikely.

Still, it didn’t bother me that Myron suited up though it did give me pause how little time he actually spent with the team. (Don’t they have any away games?) The detective’s guise permits the author to be amusing about millionaire players, groupies and fans and also puts Myron in touch with his suppressed feelings about his thwarted career. Coben, the winner of this year’s Bouchercon Award for his last paperback, “Drop Shot,” is a keen social observer, and Myron’s lethal yuppie sidekick, Windsor Horne Lockwood III, is a hoot.

Readers who relished the breakneck pace of Sue Grafton’s last Kinsey Millhone mystery, “L Is for Lawless,” may be frustrated by the more sedate and introspective sequel, M Is for Malice.

It’s January and preternaturally plucky Kinsey is in a funk (this is what happens to a woman who refuses to shop). Her recently discovered first cousin Tasha asks her to track down Guy Malek, the missing black sheep of a wealthy dysfunctional family. His father, gravel czar Bader Malek, has died, and his will divides his estate equally among his four sons. But even if Kinsey can find Guy, his loathsome brothers aren’t eager or willing to welcome the prodigal son home.

As always, Grafton’s well-crafted plot fits together like a museum reproduction jigsaw, and she’s meticulous about minor details (I now look at gravel with new respect). I admire her decision to sacrifice a little action for character development and am relieved that Kinsey has finally stopped cutting her own hair.

Readers may feel that Kinsey’s fixation on her long smoldering abandonment issues are a bit of a downer, but I trust she’ll snap out of it by the next book. If not, P may be for Prozac.

You can always bet on one thing with Dick Francis. Regardless of whether his hero is a butcher, baker or Web-site maker--or an artist, like Alexander Kinloch, his latest protagonist--within 100 pages he winds up on a racehorse. Yet despite this certainty and other fixtures in the Francis formula, his 35th book, To the Hilt is wonderful, complex and surprisingly moving.

Kinloch, nephew to an earl, lives alone in a weather-beaten shepherd’s hut in Scotland, where he plays his bagpipes and paints acrylic pictures of golf courses that depict “the perseverance of the human spirit.” His orderly existence turns dangerously chaotic when he receives a postcard from his mother informing him that his rich influential stepfather, Sir Ivan Westerling, had a heart attack. Before Alexander can leave for London to comfort mum, he’s savagely attacked and robbed by four thugs (Francis heroes seldom make it to Page 100 with their ribs intact), who keep asking, “Where is it?”

Alexander suspects that it might be a 200-year-old golden sword that he has hidden for his uncle but, naturally, he reveals nothing and, despite being in excruciating pain, manages to sketch his assailants and go to London where he learns that his dying stepfather’s brewing company is about to go under because the finance director has made off with millions of pounds. Much to the chagrin of his stepsister Patsy, Kinloch is asked to straighten out the mess. Francis seems as knowledgeable about painting as he is racing and his hero is charming. A winner.

On a recent trip to Greece, I was stunned by how briskly Stuart Woods’ mysteries were selling at the English-language bookstores.

I’d brought along his latest page turner, the aptly named Dirt, and after reading it was so exasperated that I was tempted to trade it for a couple of strings of worry beads.

“Dirt” starts with a terrific premise: What happens when the disher becomes the dishee? Amanda Dart, a tightly wrapped New York-based syndicated gossip columnist, is photographed en flagrante delicto with a married man.

To her horror, she becomes the lead item in a scandal sheet that is faxed to the nation’s cognoscenti. She hires Stone Barrington, the cop-turned-lawyer hero from an earlier novel, “New York Dead,” to investigate the source of the leaks. Stone, the son of a famous painter, would be an engaging lead if he could keep his pants zipped, but his rampant promiscuity makes him seem like a lout. His most endearing quality is that he lives in a turn-of-the-century Turtle Bay townhouse.

In fact, with the notable exception of a Mafia princess, most of the characters are so one-dimensional and morally repellent that it’s difficult to care what happens to them. The book is an easy read and the plot serviceable, but I wish the author hadn’t abandoned finesse and intelligence for a psycho-ex-machina ending.

****

WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE. By Anne Perry (Fawcett Combine: $23, 368pp.)

FADE AWAY. By Harlan Coben (Dell: $5.50, paper, 324 pp.)

M IS FOR MALICE. By Sue Grafton (Henry Holt: $25, 300 pp.)

TO THE HILT. By Dick Franis (Putnam: $24.95, 322 pp.)

DIRT. By Stuart Woods (HarperCollins: $24, 272 pp.)