Now and then—too seldom, really—one stumbles onto an addictive, engrossing novel. Every once in a while it’s also possible to find a fresh, engaging romance. And sometimes, as in The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths, you’re lucky enough to find both in one book.

Archaeologist Ruth Galloway is overweight and pushing 40, not your typical fictional heroine. Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson is brusque, with a dangerous side and nary a poetic bone in his body. Plus, he’s married. This unlikely twosome sets the sparks flying in a story that unfolds at the edge of the Saltmarsh, a line of sand and mudflats where land meets ocean and ocean meets sky. This is Ruth’s home, in North Norfolk on the English coast. The lonely yet strangely inviting landscape of rain, tides, silent drifting swans and calling birds forms a unique backdrop for an atmospheric story about the discovery of a body in the marsh that police think may be that of a young local girl who disappeared some 10 years earlier.

Inspector Nelson seeks Ruth’s advice on the remains, which instead turn out to be the body of a young girl preserved for nearly 2,000 years in the peaty bog, near a circle of ancient standing stones. Ruth, excited by the discovery of ancient remains, is nevertheless drawn into the mysteries of the present when more recent human remains are found. She begins to unravel the clues posed in a series of anonymous letters dating back over a decade—clues that point to the location of the missing local youngster.

In this dark and witty novel, Griffiths makes each paragraph seem effortless, with just the right amount of description, pathos or humor. In addition to the book’s intriguing duo, the supporting characters in this story are carefully drawn, each believable and entertaining.

The first in a new crime series, The Crossing Places reassures readers of the continuing power of fiction to envelop and entertain. This is a book to save for a rainy dark day when you need a reward. And instead of saying, as you hit the last paragraph, “Well, that’s done,” you’ll be moved to hope, “please, let there be a next one!”

Barbara Clark writes from Yarmouth, Massachusetts.

Politician-turned-author Raymond Flynn (with the help of novelist Robin Moore) has come out with a book whose cleverness and political timeliness would make even Tom Clancy jealous. In The Accidental Pope, first-time novelist Flynn has spun a smart and entertaining tale of the unlikely election and subsequent rise to fame of the Catholic Church's 265th pope. The timing of this novel about Vatican high politics could hardly be more prescient, coming at a time when Pope John Paul II's failing health has Catholics and non-Catholics alike actively speculating on his possible successor.

This admittedly highly incredible tale takes as its launching point the accidental election by the Council of Cardinals of Billy Kelly a Cape Cod fisherman, a widower and father of four, and a former priest who scandalized his Massachusetts parish by leaving the clergy in order to marry to the highest church office. Kelly accepts the cardinals' peculiar offer and ascends to the papacy as Pope Paul II (the latter day fisherman symbolically takes the papal name of history's most famous fisherman, the church's first pope). It soon becomes clear that Paul II was elected not through accident but through divine provenance, and that it will fall on his shoulders to reform the church in hopes of attracting a new generation of Catholics into the fold. Upon taking office, the new pope almost immediately sets out to resolve many of the questions facing modern Catholicism including such weighty issues as the role of women in the church, the interdict against clerical marriage, the increasingly desperate plight of the Third World and the question of contraception. The fictive American pope's role as a Vatican outsider allows him to bring a refreshing perspective to the debate on these issues.

As former mayor of Boston and U.S. ambassador to the Vatican from 1993-97, Flynn intimately understands both American Catholicism and Vatican politics, and his familiarity with his subject matter comes through in his writing. (Not unsurprisingly, both the U.S. ambassador and the state of Massachusetts receive high praise in Flynn's narrative.) Most of the novel's action takes place in Rome, but the fantastic and fast-paced plot takes the reader from Buzzard's Bay, Massachusetts, to Belfast, Ireland, to Rakai, Uganda, finally returning to the Eternal City where Flynn's amazing story ends on a note that is simultaneously tragic and hopeful.

Laura Beers is assistant literary editor of The New Republic.

Johnny Merrimon, the central figure in John Hart’s The Last Child, is a lineal descendant and spiritual soul mate of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield. Like them, this 13-year-old survivor is resilient, endlessly resourceful and determined to do the right thing in a world that settles for moral shortcuts.

Johnny’s self-imposed mission is to find his twin sister, Alyssa, who went missing a year earlier, presumably kidnapped. Her disappearance has shredded his once idyllic family. Now his father is also gone, driven away by guilt—so Johnny’s mother supposes—for having failed to pick up Alyssa when he was supposed to. Bereft by this double loss, Johnny’s ethereally beautiful mother, Katherine, has fallen into drugs, alcohol and the brutal arms of her former suitor, Ken Holloway, one of the richest men in (mythical) Raven County, North Carolina, where the narrative unfolds.

Police detective Clyde Hunt is just as obsessed as Johnny with finding Alyssa. His single-minded pursuit of the case has already cost him his wife and is threatening to snap his already frayed ties to his son. To complicate matters, he is becoming increasingly attracted to Katherine. Reduced to a summary, the story sounds like a soap opera. But it’s not. Here, the interior struggles far outweigh the interpersonal encounters.

Constitutionally a loner, Johnny resorts to every device he can think of—from Christian prayer to Indian rituals to door-to-door canvassing—in his unrelenting search for his sister. At the same time, he’s scheming feverishly to protect his mother. He becomes a footloose avenger, a truth-seeking creature of the night, fearful only of failing those he loves. If, like Huck Finn, he risks going to hell for doing his duty, then so be it.

Hart knows how sensitive boys feel and think behind those tough, smirking masks and with what ferocity they cling to their causes. Johnny is innocence and experience in perfect balance.

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville, Tennessee.

To mystery readers, Marcia Muller genuinely needs no introduction, so we'll keep it short. However, for those who aren't already familiar with the creator of the tough but humane California private eye named Sharon McCone, it's worth mentioning that Muller's new book, Listen to the Silence, is the 21st McCone adventure. In it McCone goes home to deal with her father's death, and discovers a long-secret document that changes the lives of everyone in the family. To tell more would be to break the cardinal rule of reviewing mystery novels, because the book is surprising and well, it's a mystery novel. People get hurt; McCone investigates. The only people having a good time are the readers.

Muller published her first Sharon McCone mystery, Edwin of the Iron Shoes, in 1977. "The ironic thing about it," she says from her home in California, "was that after the first book I couldn't sell another word for four years. My first publisher was David McKay Company, and with the publication of my first book they stopped doing fiction." Not surprisingly, at first Muller considered this development an ill omen, but she persevered. "Four years later, I submitted a manuscript that I had been shopping around for almost the entire time to Tom Dunne of St. Martin's Press." Dunne, who now has his own popular mystery imprint at St. Martin's, bought the book.

The so-called hard-boiled female detective was an idea whose time had come. Muller is credited with leading the pack. "It was in three months' order," Muller remembers. "First, Sara Paretsky came out with her first V. I. Warshawski novel; then Sue Grafton came out with Kinsey Millhone; then my second Sharon McCone came out the month after that." Before publishing her first couple of McCone novels, Muller was trying her hand at journalism. "Not very successfully," she adds, and laughs. "I had a tendency to make things up. Editors don't respond too kindly to that." She began to think that perhaps she ought to turn her attention to fiction, where making things up was a virtue rather than a vice.

Muller sees no end in sight for the series. Fortunately her titles aren't forced into a predictable succession, as in the case of Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone books, all of which begin with a letter of the alphabet (for example, O Is for Outlaw).

"You know, Sue and I were talking about that last year, about how she locked herself into 26 novels. You can trap yourself early on with certain things that seem like a good idea then." Over the years, Muller has discovered that, however much fun it may be to keep returning to familiar characters and settings, writing series fiction has its unforeseen complications. "There are things in my series I would have done differently, and things that I had to just stop doing because of changing times. For instance, the legal cooperative that Sharon was working for in the beginning was a product of the '70s, the poverty law movement that was going on then. And after awhile it became very restrictive in terms of the types of cases she could take on. So I had to have her quit that and go out on her own."

The continuing adventures and ever-changing life of Sharon McCone have proven quite successful. Muller has many thousands of devoted fans and has won numerous awards. She has taken home both Anthony and Shamus awards, honors named respectively for deceased mystery writer and critic Anthony Boucher and for an old nickname for private investigators. The Private Eye Writers of America gave Muller their Life Achievement Award in 1993.

Muller is married to mystery writer Bill Pronzini, and they have collaborated on three novels, a dozen or so anthologies (including one published last year by scholarly Oxford University Press), and what she describes as "one very long, five-pound book," 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado's Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction. Muller suspects that she and her husband will retire from anthologizing. "They're a lot of work, and the introductory material is a type of writing that although we've done it many times neither of us really enjoys doing. It's more fun picking the stories and getting them together, picking a theme for them."

Sharon McCone isn't the only series character Muller has written about. She's also the creator of museum curator Elena Oliverez and international art investigator Joanna Stark. "I've toyed with the idea of bringing one or the other character back in a McCone novel at some point. It might be interesting just to see two characters that I've created separately interact." Muller has already performed a version of this trick, in Double from the mid-1980s, a novel she and her husband co-wrote, starring both Sharon McCone and Pronzini's popular Nameless Detective. Pronzini's career demonstrates other hazards of series writing that occur when writers incorporate certain gimmicks. Not only does his detective have no name, which requires author and readers alike to simply call him Nameless, but Pronzini trapped himself into one-word titles for these books. "He's now doing a lot of non-series things," Muller says, "so he's able to use a wonderful title he finds, but for awhile there he was giving all the really good titles to me."

Asked about the provenance of the title Listen to the Silence, Muller laughs and says, "Now whose was that? It's gotten where I can't remember which ones were mine and which were his. I think that one was his."

Michael Sims is a writer, curator, and regular contributor to BookPage.

Ever since I read A Is for Alibi, 13 books ago, I've been hooked on the adventures of Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton's private investigator, who works out of Santa Teresa, California. I have followed Kinsey through B Is for Burglar, C Is for Corpse, all the way through M Is for Malice. The 14th in the series, N Is for Noose, is the best yet, and all of them rate five diamonds. Kinsey is brave, bright, funny, and human. I hurt for her when she's about to get a tetanus shot: The nurse comes back "holding the you-know-what on a little plastic tray like a snack." I chew the inside of my lip when fear shoots through her "like a bottle rocket, lighting my insides with a shower of adrenaline." I worry about her diet when she picks up a "pack of chips and a can of Pepsi" for dinner.

The setting for N Is for Noose is Nota Lake, a threadbare town on the eastern edge of the Sierras (ten gas stations and 22 motels), that caters to the less-than-wealthy ski crowd. Selma Newquist, the widow of a detective in the sheriff's department, hires Kinsey to find out why her husband, Tom, had been so distraught in the several weeks before his fatal heart attack. Kinsey has her doubts about the assignment, figuring Tom's behavior could be blamed on failing health or who knows what. She starts with no clues, several times coming close to backing out. Tom was respected. His colleagues liked him. He didn't seem to be messing around with other women. His finances were in order. Kinsey dutifully follows a few flimsy leads, and we're right there with her, wondering where she's being led. Then, as she digs deeper, she unearths more than she expected, and soon we're immersed in a can't-put-it-down adventure.

I'm not about to give the plot away, but it twists and turns in the most satisfying way. As in all the Kinsey Millhone books, she is real. The words on paper disappear, and we are with her, whether she is bemoaning her housekeeping, "Every time I buy parsley, it turns to slime," or reacting to a hunk, "I allowed myself one small inaudible whine of the sort heard only by dogs." If Kinsey were to step off the page, I would recognize her, understand her better than my own sister, sympathize with her frailties and shortcomings.

If this is your introduction to Sue Grafton's Alphabet Series, beware! You will find you need to make more shelf space for all 14 books, plus those to come. If you have already met Kinsey Millhone, join her growing fan club, waiting not-so-patiently for her next adventure, O Is for . . . ?

Reviewed by Cynthia Riggs.