Normal cats may have nine lives, but this is the 23rd life for Lilian Jackson Braun's cats, who are back with another episode in the life of the good folks in Moose County, 400 miles north of everywhere. These books can be found in the mystery section, but readers know that the stories are more about Jim Qwilleran and his two precocious Siamese cats, Koko and Yum Yum. Qwilleran is a former journalist from down below, but became the benefactor of an entire region when he inherited a fortune and established a foundation to give away the money. Now he writes a popular column and generally involves himself in the lives of his neighbors, including his librarian friend Polly.

This latest finds Qwill and the Siamese on the trail of a murder. The old Pickax Hotel has been renovated after being bombed, and grand opening ceremonies have been timed to coordinate with other activities guaranteed to excite the northlanders. A Chicago jewelry dealer, accompanied by his attractive young niece, is visiting to buy the antique jewelry of wealthy, elderly women in town and to offer quality pieces for sale. And the eagerly anticipated Scottish gathering and highland games have the town abuzz. Qwill is honoring his Scottish ancestry by getting out his best kilt.

The jewelry dealer, however, is found murdered, and the champion of the claber toss at the highland games is considered the chief suspect.

The cats start generating clues by stepping on the phone as it's about to ring, yowling in the middle of the night at the exact time the murder takes place, chewing on pencils, hiding gum wrappers, and stealing the pennies intended to be dropped into an antique mechanical bank (thus the title of the book).

Readers of this best-selling series will welcome the return of the entire litter of unusual people. But be cautious about wearing a kilt and having cats on your lap!

George Cowmeadow Bauman is the co-owner of the Acorn Bookshop in Columbus, Ohio, and wrote this with two Siamese cats sharing his desktop.

The sequencing of the Stephanie Plum series, by Janet Evanovich, is self-evident from its titles but not mandatory. The first Plum novel, One for the Money, was nominated for five respected awards. It won two the Dilys and the Creasey. Evanovich's fifth offering, High Five, once again set deep in the heart of Trenton, aligns skip-tracing Plum with crazed associates and pits her against a menagerie of over-the-top antagonists.

Problem One: Uncle Fred, who's been feuding with the garbage collectors, is missing. A packet of gruesome photos is found in his desk. Problem Two: someone from the garbage collection company is murdered. Is Fred the victim or the culprit?

Nothing for Stephanie is storybook perfect. Her job and finances frustrate her. Her family offers off-kilter comfort; her love life consists of a rocky affair with city detective Joe Morelli and a complicating attraction to her mentor, an ex-Navy Seal and domestic mercenary. Plum also must confront two stalkers the hapless Bunchy, who claims Fred owes him a gambling debt, and the menacing Ramirez, a fresh-from-prison psychopath with a thing for Stephanie.

Evanovich wields wonderful humor while weaving a tight story and sustaining suspense.

Tom Corcoran is the Florida-based author of The Mango Opera.

The flood of new mysteries in recent years presents a continuing problem that begs us not to complain: so many tales, so little time. The logical corollary: so many books, so little space for review. This month several books stand out as distinctive fare. All are by experienced writers, and each will add to the writer's growing reputation.

Martha Grimes is still basking in the success of last year's bestseller, The Stargazey, her 15th novel featuring Scotland Yard's Richard Jury. The western U.S. setting and youthful protagonist of Biting the Moon offer an intriguing contrast to the Jury series. Teenage amnesia victim Andi Olivier a name she invents as a first step toward solving her personal mystery wakes in a New Mexico motel room with no idea how she got there. Assuming that she'd been kidnapped by a man posing as her father, Andi escapes to the late-winter Sandia wilderness where, as it turns out, she launches a campaign to release wild animals from illegal leg traps. While burgling a pharmacy for painkillers suited to injured animals, Andi encounters Mary Dark Hope, an even younger girl who becomes a sympathetic partner in Andi's quest to identify herself. The logical first step is to identify her father. The girls' search takes them through rural Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho, into the realms of game poachers, child abusers, and government trappers. The toughest mystery fans should never think that the musings and sometimes headlong meanderings of adolescents can't put fear into one's soul.

Texas native Deborah Crombie has been nominated for all three major awards in the mystery field. Her Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James series takes us cross-pond for contemporary Scotland Yard intrigue. The discovery of a female murder victim in London's Dockland area launches Kissed a Sad Goodbye into a web of familial intrigue and decades-old grudges. With obstacles ranging from inspectors' intramural rivalries and heavy schedules to an expanding number of suspects and credible motives, Crombie draws her readers into subterfuge in commerce and the history of the Mudchute district. Must the brilliant but manipulative victim share responsibility for her own death? Of course not. But numerous people benefited from the murder. Each is a suspect, and only the protagonists' disentangling of class and economic differences, business partnerships, and romantic links will bring a solution.

In Barbara Parker's Suspicion of Betrayal, Miami attorney Gail Connor suffers Dade County Syndrome: Crime hits close to home. In this mystery, too, social disparities and ill feelings from the past contribute barriers to the truth. Gail Connor questions her wisdom in buying a home in need of renovation; she questions her ex-husband's motives regarding custody of their 11-year-old daughter; she worries about the attitudes of her Cuban fiance. Toss in Miami ingredients such as narcotics, money brokers, the dockside easy life, and the vagaries of the justice system, and Parker's novel offers readers a perfect reflection of complex lifestyle and a gutsy approach to ending a nightmare. To describe more of the plot would be to undermine the first third of the book; but Miami's blending of cultures, especially the broad Hispanic influence, plays a role as large as any character's.

This month we also recommend Blood Mud (Mysterious Press, $23, 0892966475) by veteran K.C. Constantine, another fine Mario Balzic mystery set in western Pennsylvania; and The Color of Night (Warner Books, $25, 0446523615), a suspenseful thriller by David Lindsey that takes us from Houston to exotic locales and treacherous intrigue in Europe.

Tom Corcoran is the Florida-based author of The Mango Opera and the forthcoming Gumbo Limbo.

What is a, if not the, hallmark of a mystery novel? I've said it before, and I'll say it again: as Raymond Chandler is my witness, it's muddle. Sometimes, as with Chandler, it's nearly impenetrable muddle, and sometimes, as with Dorothy L. Sayers, it's logical muddle (oxymoronic though that may sound). But either way, when it's done well, as those two writers do it, it's satisfying muddle for the reader.

Does muddle sound like a pejorative comment, as if the author didn't know what he was doing? Why should it? Life's a muddle, an only partially successful attempt to impose order upon disorder. We can't really know what's going to happen next, and often we don't know the reasons for what happened before. Most often, there are none.

The perfect conditions, in other words, for mystery, as William Boyd has learned well. A writer who has turned his hand to everything from the comic (A Good Man in Africa) to the historical (The New Confessions), he now turns it, in Armadillo, to what amounts to a mystery.

The author lays out the question up front, in the novel's epigraph from W.V. Quine's From Stimulus to Science: There are surprises, and they are unsettling. How can we tell when we are right? We are faced with the problem of error. The person chiefly faced with this unsettling condition of life, this problem of error, is Lorimer Black, the armadillo of the title. Boyd also helpfully provides a dictionary definition of armadillo: little armed man. That's our Lorimer, so obsessed with the notion of protection that he collects ancient armor helmets. He carefully makes minute alterations in his dress and appearance because [t]hey functioned, in a way, as a form of invisible armor.

Except that it's not Lorimer; it's Milomre Blocj, born in England of Romanian Gypsies. (The 'j' is silent and there is a dot under the 'c,' Lorimer's father would constantly explain.) The difficulty of pronouncing his birth name is not the only reason Lorimer changed it. He is fascinated with name-changing. It seems to be another form of armor.

Protection from what? On one level, from his unpolished family, particularly his loutish brother, Slobodan. More essentially, going back to the issue raised in the epigraph, from uncertainty. It is his consciousness of uncertainty, we can say with some certainty, that makes it difficult for Lorimer to sleep.

Because Lorimer works in a business that ostensibly provides a measure of certainty in an uncertain world: insurance. Except he is what his boss calls the rogue element in insurance. He is a loss adjuster. He investigates large insurance claims for fraud. It pays him well. It's not the business that causes his uncertainty; he's in the business because of his affinity for uncertainty.

Lately, however, a more immediate form of uncertainty has entered his life, stemming from a fire at a hotel under construction. He successfully challenges the multimillion-pound claim on the grounds of arson and reaps a nice bonus for his efforts.

He also reaps a number of enemies from among those who stood to gain from the claim. Then things turn queer. Despite Lorimer's triumph, his boss, aptly named Hogg, begins to turn against him. His car is blow-torched, probably by a disgruntled insurance claimant. He is mugged, perhaps by the husband of an actress named Flavia he is besotted with, perhaps by the insurance claimant. Then, even queerer, those who had been outraged by the denial of their insurance claim are suddenly quite amiable, and Hogg acts aggressively suspicious of him. Is some sort of double-cross being worked here? Is Lorimer being set up? It grows increasingly unclear who is doing what to whom and why.

From a position of steady normality . . . he now found himself adrift in uncertainty and chaos, we are told. And, to a South African businessman who mysteriously enters, and further muddles, the picture, he remarks, "As I keep saying to people: I simply don't understand what's going on." Never fear, though, he figures it out. He also figures out a way to protect his scapegoat hide from those who apparently want to nail it to the jailhouse door.

It would be unfair to reveal more. After all, this novel, for all its stylishness, is at bottom a mystery with clues for each reader to work out. It's not too much to say, however, that Lorimer also gets the girl. Or so it would seem. There's always that element of uncertainty.

Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Janesville, Wisconsin.