Tucked away in the closet of Michael Simon’s New York apartment is a roll of butcher paper that measures roughly three feet wide and 16 feet long. Unfurl it and you’ll discover a detailed roadmap of the intricately woven plot of his totally absorbing first novel, Dirty Sally, a detective thriller set in Austin, Texas, during the late 1980s.

"The plot was the biggest challenge," Simon says during a call to his home. "There are so many things going on in this book. They have to interact, and they have to be real and dramatic and develop in a compelling way."

Compelling, Dirty Sally certainly is. As the novel opens, detective Dan Reles, a native New Yorker and a Jew transplanted to Austin, is coming apart at the seams after the recent death of his partner, Joey Velez, the first non-white officer to make the city’s homicide squad. Reles’ weird, angry behavior after his partner’s fatal car crash makes him the subject of an internal affairs investigation. The highly publicized case of a young prostitute killed and dismembered in an Austin crack house offers Reles a way to salvage his career. So with the clock ticking, he sets out to identify the victim – whom the squad nicknames "Dirty Sally" – and find her murderer. The problem is that his investigation leads him to a series of shady real estate development deals that involve the city’s most powerful citizens. And, as it turns out, not all of Reles’ homicide department colleagues are eager to see him redeem himself.

Simon says it took something like five years and 15 drafts to engineer the dramatic intersections of scenes and storylines that make his first Dan Reles detective novel (he is now at work on the second book in the series) so difficult to put down. To support himself during his long construction project, Simon taught writing and acting in New York for a number of years and then took a job as a proofreader for an advertising agency. For three years he wrote every morning, went to work in the afternoon, came home late at night, went to bed, then got up and did the same thing all over again. "From the night I decided to write the book, I was never half-hearted about it," he says.

As Simon tells it, he was inspired to write Dirty Sally by a conversation with his brother, who was intent on writing a military thriller and thereby achieve fame, fortune and immortality in the process. "I thought, well, there must be a way I can get a piece of this," he says, laughing. In fact, six or seven other friends also boarded the thriller-writing bandwagon. But absolutely everybody else dropped out except Simon.

Part of what sustained him was the memory of the searing experiences he’d had as a probation officer in Austin, a job he took to support himself after his graduate fellowship at the University of Texas ran out. At that time Texas, which Simon says has a long history of imposing "ridiculously long prison sentences," had explosively overcrowded prisons and, as a result, had begun undersentencing dangerous felons, churning hard cases out into the parole system. "It’s not that I particularly believe in the prison system," Simon says, "but there are some people who shouldn’t be on the street."

The effect on Simon and his coworkers was profoundly demoralizing. "I think that was the core of me wanting to write this book about law enforcement, because the work itself can be so damaging. You develop this really dark humor and you eat a lot," he says.

Simon’s main character, detective Dan Reles, doesn’t overeat but he has the dark humor of a moral hero in an immoral situation. "When Dan makes a joke it’s a dark joke," Simon says. "There are things he finds disturbing and wrong, things that fill him with contempt. So he makes a joke about it and the joke lets off some tension, but it doesn’t make him happy."

An inverted moral universe suffused with a hard dark humor is the essence of a noir thriller, and in Dirty Sally, Simon offers his own unique contribution to the genre. "The structure of a regular mystery is politically conservative," Simon says. "You have an orderly world, then one utterly extreme crime takes place and the world is totally messed up, and then a detective comes in and solves the crime and the world is fine again." Simons says the masters of noir fiction writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler – turned this convention on its head: after the crime is solved, the world is "still awful."

Thus, one of the things that’s most surprising and daring about Simon’s version of the noir thriller is that he’s decided to locate its action in sunny, optimistic Austin. "I moved to Austin in the late 1980s," Simon says. "It was this incredibly beautiful town, clean, friendly. Then I got this funny job and suddenly I was looking at the other part of town, the poor part of town. I was seeing who was living by working really, really hard and who was living by doing something illegal or illicit: dealing drugs, working as a prostitute or as a pimp. And it shook up my perspective."

So Simon paints a gritty portrait of a police department divided by racial tensions, neighborhoods decimated by drugs, and a city whose financial and political power structure promotes privatization of public resources for personal gain. Through the murk of this moral and political corruption the emotionally wounded Dan Reles tries to get his man.

For all the background he manages to weave so adroitly into his tale, Simon says he "doesn’t mean Dirty Sally to be an issue-driven drama; this isn’t a political diatribe or a bumper sticker. What I really want is for the reader to enjoy the ride."

With its intricate weave of plotlines, authentic detail and strong, no-nonsense writing, Dirty Sally does indeed offer a good ride. A very good ride.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

Russian homicide detective Arkady Renko's cases have mirrored the historic upheavals within the Soviet Union during the past quarter of a century. He has battled his old-guard bosses and the KGB in Gorky Park, been thrown into exile aboard a Soviet trawler in Polar Star, returned to confront the rise of the post-Soviet Mafia in Red Square and, in a busman's holiday, investigated a friend's murder during a tour of Russia's orphan, Cuba, in Havana Bay.

In his latest adventure, Wolves Eat Dogs, the indomitable inspector confronts crimes against man and nature when a murder trail leads into the frightening, fascinating world of modern man's biggest technological blunder, Chernobyl.

When wealthy New Russian Pasha Ivanov falls (or is pushed) 11 stories to his death, Renko's business-as-usual superiors rule it a suicide, case closed. But a saltshaker found beneath the body leads Renko to an eerie discovery: Ivanov's sumptuous digs are white-hot with cesium 137, a deadly radioactive isotope.

Two years ago, popular suspense writer Martin Cruz Smith visited Chernobyl against the advice of almost everyone. Like his fictional alter ego, Smith listened to his instincts instead.

"When I first broached the subject of Chernobyl, everyone said that's the last thing anyone would want to read about, it's so grim," he says by phone from his home in San Rafael, California. "But when I went there, it was so much more interesting than I first thought. It was interesting to see people under such pressure. There was incredible heroism among the so-called liquidators who were cleaning up that mess. Many of them carried radioactive materials in their hands with absolutely no idea how dangerous that was, but some of them did understand and they sacrificed themselves." Many Americans assume Chernobyl was abandoned after the 1986 disaster. Not so. The 135,000 inhabitants of the two closest towns, Pripyat and Chernobyl, were evacuated, but the workers who manned the three functioning reactors and the liquidators who tried to contain the damage within the fourth reactor stayed behind. The last of the active Chernobyl reactors was finally shut down last year.

Smith recalls his first look at the sarcophagus that surrounds, though hardly "contains," the world-famous number four reactor; radioactivity from it continues to seep into the groundwater that feeds the Dnepr River.

"It looks like a monument to a disaster," he says. "It strongly resembles a cage, a cage that looks very impressive at first sight but then the more you study and know about it, the flimsier it becomes." In fact, Chernobyl has become the unofficial sick joke of the once-proud Ukraine. There was the unnecessary low-power test that triggered the chain reaction that caused a deadly fireball to blow the roof off the tower, contaminating the Northern Hemisphere. Then came an unexplainable three-day silence from Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev during which children played in the green foam, the plant's protection against radioactive release. After the forced evacuation of Pripyat, the government built a new town, Slavutych, on a radioactive site it called its "cesium patch." "Pripyat really lets you know that things have gone very much awry; you walk into a city of 50,000 and you're the only one," Smith recalls. "But then they moved the workers to Slavutych and planted them on radioactive ground. How could they screw up so badly?" Workers clad in camouflage commute daily from Slavutych to the reactors, passing through radiation detectors frequently. A microdot of cesium or plutonium invisible to the naked eye is enough to send a Geiger counter needle off the gage. In his week inside the Zone of Exclusion, Smith carried a dosimeter constantly.

"Some of the veterans get these cavalier attitudes. I had a guide with me in a Pripyat amusement park who called me over and said, Put your dosimeter here.' So I put it down and the needle just flew off, a thousand times normal. I said, why are we standing here?! It was just a random spot in the town that was not marked by a stake and warnings." In Smith's new novel, one of Ivanov's vice presidents is found in Pripyat with his throat slashed. Murder means little in a town that has seen so much death. To solve the case, Renko enlists the help of Eva, a sexy but deeply cynical physician who treats the scavengers and old Ukrainians who have returned to Chernobyl despite its deadly toxicity.

The title of the novel, Wolves Eat Dogs, refers to a leitmotif expertly woven throughout the narrative. Wolves in fact have returned to Chernobyl in great numbers, as have wild boar, deer and other wildlife, all of it radioactive from wandering through the so-called "black villages" and numerous hot zones that will remain for thousands of years. For Chernobyl, and indeed the former Soviet Union, explosive change has brought about a new natural order, a wolf-eat-dog world.

In retrospect, Smith considers Chernobyl one of the first irreparable cracks that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. "The Russian authorities would like to say it was human error, that 15 fools got together and did this thing," he says. "But in fact, the reactor was unstable at low levels of output and this piece of information had not been relayed to the technicians who were running the test." Smith says the catastrophic events at Chernobyl brought to light the secrecy at the heart of the Soviet system. "The Russian people definitely saw it as the worst example of that," he notes, and the three-day delay before the general alarm was issued led to "a real collapse in the credibility and belief in the state." Jay MacDonald happened to be driving through Middletown, Pennsylvania, during the Three Mile Island nuclear incident.

Literary novelist takes on the Corleone family Mark Winegardner is dead tired. The past two years of his life have been spent holed up in monastic artist colonies like Yaddo for months at a time, writing around the clock. Down the stretch, during the last eight weeks of writing, he literally slept every other night, a man on fire determined to make the most of an opportunity most writers would kill for: to write the sequel to The Godfather.

For years, Random House editor Jonathan Karp had urged Mario Puzo to revisit the Corleone family: What happened to crooner Johnny Fon-tane? Irish consigliere Tom Hagen? Michael and Kay? Puzo wasn’t interested, but he had no objection to his family continuing the saga after his death. Three years ago, Karp, Puzo’s oldest son Anthony and literary agent Neil Olson discretely contacted dozens of writers, some household names, soliciting proposals for the first sequel, The Godfather Returns. Short of cloning, they could not have found a better successor than Winegardner. Like Puzo when he wrote his 1969 runaway bestseller, Winegardner is a highly regarded literary novelist (Crooked River Burning, Veracruz Blues) in his early 40s who hasn’t delved previously into the Sicilian underworld. He is also at the top of his game, eager for a broader audience and fully cognizant of the pressure and perils of following in oversized footsteps.

“When I saw the request for proposals, I asked Jon to level with me. I said, Look, before I invest a lot of time into this, tell me the truth: at the end of the day, you’re just going to pick some super-famous crime novelist, aren’t you?” Winegardner says from his home in Tallahassee, where he heads the creative writing program at Florida State University. “And he said, Nope. I can’t promise you we’ll choose you, but I can promise you we will choose a writer a lot like you.” Many of the proposals played it safe by suggesting prequels about the life of the godfather, Vito Corleone, affording the author a relatively blank canvas. Wine-gardner, however, accepted the greater challenge: to devise a story that accommodates not only the original novel but also the two popular film sequels.

“That was the crazy part. I didn’t have to do that; I just decided to do that,” he says.

“I could have theoretically ignored everything in the movies that didn’t come from the book. Instead, I kind of maneuver around them. I decided early on that I would neither mention the stuff that happens in the movies but not the book, nor would I contradict it. It took me a long time to work out.” Winegardner found his setting and main inspiration in the late 1950s, when Don Michael Corleone is struggling for a way out of organized crime. “I knew for sure that I could do this when I realized that Michael Corleone’s greatest yearning, to be legitimate, was an aspect of the story that had never been resolved. It is somehow resolved by the time Godfather III starts; he’s succeeded in a mixed way that he’s resigned to, but it is absolutely unresolved in Godfather II. I thought, holy cow, we need to see how he succeeds or fails. When did he get to the half-baked success that, at the beginning of Godfather III, it seems he has had for decades?” Winegardner picks up numerous secondary characters from the cutting room floor, including Michael Corleone’s contentious brother Fredo, Sonny’s widow and family (Sonny’s son Frankie here becomes a Notre Dame star linebacker nicknamed “The Hit-man”) and yes, the lovable Johnny Fontane. (For readers who feel a bit lost, The Godfather Returns includes a chronology of the two novels and the films, as well as an extensive list of characters.) Puzo would have approved of the way Winegardner seamlessly weaves his plot into the Godfather story to produce a singularly enjoyable mid-quel that’s lighter on its feet than the original. Winegardner freely acknowledges that the hundreds of post-Godfather novels, films and TV shows, from Donnie Brasco and Goodfellas to “The Sopranos,” enabled him to infuse The Godfather Returns with both humor and realistic sex that weren’t possible in 1969.

“The Godfather is a masterpiece of storytelling, but it is a little bit of a humorless book,” he says. “I know about the Mafia, both from talking with some minor guys and reading more than a hundred books about it, and these are not humorless men. I had the benefit of all the Mafia lore and was better able to go for a certain realism. Puzo just didn’t have access to that at the New York Public Library.” Winegardner isn’t concerned that he’ll lose his own fans by continuing Puzo’s tale. “This is my own work,” he insists. “I was circling around this subject matter my entire career. If they had hired a novelist who had written a lot about the Mafia already, they would have somebody who had already spent some of his capital on this. I had a clean plate. Heap it on, I’m ready to go.” He certainly wouldn’t refuse an offer to write another sequel. “I think people thought it was easier to not have to weave in around the movies, but I feel like hey, wait a minute, I just did the hardest part I weaved around one of the greatest movies of all time and came out the other side,” he says. “If anyone is going to advance the ball down the field from here, it’s going to be me.”

Who would have thought it? A prim 1930s British gumshoe is one of the freshest, most modern heroines in recent memory. With the third installment in author Jacqueline Winspear's mystery series, Maisie Dobbs takes her place in the upper echelon of literary female detectives, right next to Kinsey Millhone and Kay Scarpetta—the main difference being that unlike her thoroughly modern counterparts, Maisie Dobbs lives in post-World War I London. In Pardonable Lies, we find Maisie Dobbs' private investigation practice flourishing. Her compassionate yet methodical approach to her work has made her services much sought after. Still, although more than a decade has passed, her gruesome work as a nurse in a casualty clearing station in France during the war continues to plague her. When the powerful Sir Cecil Lawton hires her to discover the truth about his son's death while serving as a pilot in the war, Dobbs is forced to return to France and face her own awful memories.

When the powerful Sir Cecil Lawton hires her to discover the truth about his son's death while serving as a pilot in the war, Maisie Dobbs is forced to return to France and face her own awful memories.

Rich with historical detail and packing several interwoven mysteries for Maisie to untangle, Pardonable Lies is as stylish as a whodunit gets. Winspear paints a haunting picture of how it must have been to be young at that moment in history, with a gingerly hopeful world still reeling but also slowly rebuilding after the war. The devastating human toll of World War I cannot be overstated the war virtually decimated an entire generation of young men. It is estimated that two million young women faced the prospect of living their lives without husbands. Very much a woman of her time, Maisie in some ways also resembles a single woman circa 2005 she not only owns her own business, she has collected an eclectic group of friends, found herself a handsome young doctor to date and even is considering buying her own home.

"Life was never going to be as these women had expected it to be," says Winspear, who spoke to BookPage from her home in southern California, where she had just returned from back-to-back trips to New York and England to promote her current book and research her next one. "They had to make a life alone, and were fiercely independent. They had to work; they had to find companionship in other ways. The whole period is one of immense change and turmoil."

Long fascinated with the role of women between the first and second world wars, Winspear was eager to continue exploring this new reality for women in Pardonable Lies. Maisie clearly feels the pressure of making her business a success, and she also experiences the subtle prejudice against spinster women when she seeks a loan to buy a home. Winspear's fascinating peek into the life of a long-ago generation adds depth that makes the Maisie Dobbs series so difficult to define: it's part mystery and part historical fiction, with a dash of love story thrown in.

Although Winspear has won Agatha Awards for both Maisie Dobbs and Birds of a Feather, the first two books in the series, she is still amazed when she hears one of her books described as a mystery that reads like a novel. "Well, why shouldn't it?" asks Winspear.

Although she's a fan of mystery writers such as Patricia Cornwell and Jonathan Kellerman, Winspear admits she is more likely to read nonfiction, particularly biographies, which satisfy her nosy tendencies. "Because I write mysteries, I very rarely read mysteries," she says. "I know that's a sin—or is it?" She finds herself drawn to the genre as an author because of the particular challenges of writing a compelling mystery that also captures human elements.

"A mystery offers an enormous landscape with which to work," she says. "With a mystery, everything must come right in the end as much as possible. Yet life doesn't give perfect endings. Life is a journey. So this challenges an author: give readers something that rings true, and that also satisfies them." To make sure Pardonable Lies did ring true, Winspear paid a visit to the site of a casualty clearing station cemetery in Belgium. It was to these mobile hospitals that the wounded were brought in the middle of combat, and they were the scenes of some of the bloodiest, most horrific moments of the war as doctors and nurses of many nationalities worked to save as many lives as possible.

A pivotal scene in the book has Maisie returning to such a spot, and Winspear wanted to be sure she got it right.

"The rain was sideways across the land," Winspear recalls of her pilgrimage. "The cemetery was no bigger than someone's backyard garden. It was a very emotional experience. I wanted to know, how would it be if you had spent a significant point in your girlhood where you saw such terrible things?" This painstaking research and loyalty to the truth of the time in which Maisie lives is important to Winspear, but she is careful never to sacrifice story for the sake of historical accuracy. A graceful writer, Winspear brings 1930s London alive, describing the clothes, the food and the manners of the era without ever getting bogged down in details.

"The truth of the matter is, I'm a storyteller first and foremost," she says. "Everything else has to be in support of the story. I just want to reflect the spirit of the era." She suspects current events might have something to do with the success of the Maisie Dobbs series. "We're living in what are perceived as uncertain times in this country," Winspear said. " When you read something historical, you know we got through it and life goes on. When you read a mystery, you know that in the end everything will be right in the world. We need some of that."

Winspear, who moved to the United States from England in 1990, is already at work on the fourth Maisie Dobbs book. She pledges to continue the series as long as she feels the stories continue to offer something original.

"It has to be fresh for me," she said. "Maisie Dobbs has to grow and change like we all do. If she's not, it's stagnant. A reader comes back to serial characters to see how they've changed."

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.