Patricia Cornwell is back with familiar friends and at her absolute best as a novelist. Though Cornwell has tried other literary pursuits, nothing succeeds like Dr. Kay Scarpetta and the cast of characters around her who make mystery reading pure pleasure.

Dr. Scarpetta is growing older as is everyone and her sometime lover, Benton Wesley, is grayer. Her niece Lucy has changed jobs after leaving the FBI and now works for the ATF. Her familiar sidekick, Peter Marino, is beefier, smokes heavily and sometimes ruffles Scarpetta’s feathers. Generally, they mirror the human condition.

For the uninitiated, Dr. Kay Scarpetta is the chief medical examiner for the commonwealth of Virginia. She is also a consultant to the FBI, often called in on cases that are extraordinarily baffling. This time she has a real puzzler. A fire burns down the house and horse barn of a prominent and wealthy man while he is away, destroying some very fine horses. There is also a dead blonde in the bathroom of the main house. With an onslaught of mysterious fires and deaths, Dr. Scarpetta is increasingly bewildered but keeps her cool, even in the midst of a very personal tragedy. Evidently, an audacious and cunning killer is on the loose, but finding and unmasking him sets this mystery apart from the ordinary. Cornwell’s mastery of suspense is notable, and Point of Origin is certainly no exception.

This is a superb choice for anyone’s summer reading but the odds are that some will find it difficult to put down while the day turns to night, and night to early morning. This is, as the saying goes, a page-turner that will keep the reader utterly enthralled, wondering what will happen next.

Reviewed by Lloyd Armour.

In every city with a major military presence, a district can be found which serves the libidinal cravings of the personnel stationed there. The closer the proximity to the enemy, the broader the range of services offered. In Itaewon, the pleasure quarter of Seoul, Korea, arrangements can be made to satisfy the most jaded and unusual of tastes for the price of a package of American cigarettes or a bottle of Scotch. Still, staggering quantities of dollars and “won” are exchanged for products and services of a decidedly x-rated nature. The authorities, both local and military, tend to look the other way, as long as things don’t get too out of hand. It is the job of CID officers George Sueno and Ernie Bascom to make sure that things don’t get too out of hand. They carry a badge. (Okay, two badges . . . ) Buddha’s Money is the third outing for Martin Limon’s rough and tumble anti-heroes. The first, Jade Lady Burning, involved the criminal antics of a high-ranking officer; the second, Slicky Boys, found Sueno and Bascom deeply involved with an underground organization of thieves. This time, somewhat older and marginally wiser, the two are in a race against time to find an ancient jade skull which purportedly is inscribed with a map to the lost riches of Kublai Khan. Normally, this sort of venture would be outside their purview, except that the daughter of a retired Army man has been kidnapped and held for a particular ransom the jade skull. The kidnappers believe that the girl’s father, now a quasi-legitimate dealer in Asian antiquities, is the go-between in a deal to smuggle the skull out of the country, and give him a deadline after which his daughter will be killed. The only problem is he doesn’t have the skull. He turns to Sueno and Bascom in desperation.

The heroes are well-drawn, multi-dimensional characters. Sueno, the narrator, is an East LA orphan, for whom the Army is the only parent he has ever known, while Bascom, the contrapuntal brawling palooka, is happiest when he has a beer in one hand and a woman (or women!) in the other. This time, however, the major female attraction, the sensuous Lady Ahn, seems to be interested in Sueno . . . or is she? After all, she wants the jade skull as well. So, for that matter, does the nefarious Mongol monk, Ragyapa, who will stop at nothing in resurrecting his Evil Empire. Let’s not forget Choi So-lan, the bald little Buddhist nun, who has every intention of setting herself afire in the town square if the skull is not returned to her sect. And just where does Herbalist So, the enigmatic head of the notorious slicky boys, fit in? Buddha’s Money, of all the Bascom and Sueno novels, has the most far-fetched premise, with a latter-day Raiders of the Lost Ark feel. Still, the action is nonstop, the dialogue is crisp, and the mood is edgy and tense from beginning to end.

Reviewed by Bruce Tierney.

Charlie Bradshaw is no Magnum, PI. Magnum is youngish, fit, trim, handsome. Charlie Bradshaw is middle-aged, balding, paunchy. Magnum drives a Ferrari; Charlie drives an aging, somewhat-the-worse-for-wear Mazda. Magnum lives in Honolulu; Charlie lives in Saratoga, a small town in upstate New York. Magnum gets his pick of Hawaii’s bodacious babes; Charlie has only recently moved in with a single mother of two teenage girls.

Charlie used to be a cop, but he had the uncanny knack for opening his mouth at the wrong time, to the wrong people. The chief of police would like nothing better than to yank Charlie’s private investigator license; there has been no love lost between them for years. Charlie’s relatives are all wealthy conservative business-types, pillars of the community; they all look down their noses at Charlie. Required by custom to give him the time of day, they will give him precious little else. So Charlie skates through his life on the thinnest of ice, eking out a living with security work, the occasional investigation, and odd jobs for the criminal element connected with the horseracing for which Saratoga is famous.

Charlie’s best friend is retiree Victor (” . . . call me Vic”) Plotz, a cheerful old codger with an eye for a scam and an easy buck. Vic gets recruited by an old mobster to retrieve a suitcase from Montreal. Upon delivery, the mobster will pay Vic two thousand dollars. If this sounds too good to be true, well, it is. Vic can’t help but tear apart the suitcase to find out just what kind of trouble he may be inviting. In the false bottom of the case he finds money lots of it. Concerned for his continued well-being, Vic calls Charlie. Charlie removes a hundred dollar bill from one of the stacks and checks it out while Vic delivers the balance. The hundred turns out to be counterfeit, and worse yet, the mobster discovers it missing. Hijinks ensue.

Written from the point of view of Vic Plotz, Dobyns’s latest has a different feel from the Charlie Bradshaw novels that precede it: a bit more tongue-in-cheek, the characterizations a little more broadly drawn. Unlike the previous Saratoga novels, in Saratoga Strongbox the central character is Vic, rather than Charlie. (This sort of thing is not without precedent in Dobyns’s work; he is no stranger to unusual perspective. In his excellent Aftershocks and Near Escapes he wrote from the point of view of a six-year-old Chilean girl caught in a massive earthquake in the early 1960s.) It makes for an interesting shift, revisiting the “same old story with a different twist.” Reviewed by Bruce Tierney.

Several years ago there was an actor, a former bodybuilder, who starred in some B-grade movies. While these films had made money, they really hadn’t taken his career to the next level. Then his agent sent him a script, a science fiction story about a man who is sent into the past to prevent an assassination. Would he be interested in playing the hero? The bodybuilder was muscular, but he wasn’t stupid; the part he really wanted, he told the agent, was that of the assassin. The agent pitched this to the director, James Cameron, and the bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger, became The Terminator and a star.

Let’s face it, in movies and in literature the villain is often the most interesting character. Look at John Milton’s Paradise Lost the devil gets all the good lines. So it is in Daniel Silva’s new novel, The Mark of the Assassin, a thriller set against the background of modern-day geopolitics and the covert war waged by intelligence agencies behind the scenes. A war that is suddenly made hotter by the actions of one man, a freelance killer for hire with a trademark signature three bullets in the face.

CIA operative Michael Osbourne is drawn into this war when a jumbo jet is shot down over Long Island. A middle-east expert, Osbourne is called in when the body of a known terrorist is found near the crash site with three bullet holes in its face. The evidence points to a Palestinian splinter group, but Osbourne isn’t so sure. What follows is an investigation that takes him to three continents as he unravels a startling conspiracy, and puts him on a collision course with the assassin known only as October.

The Mark of the Assassin shines is in its portrayal of October, otherwise known as Jean-Paul Delaroche, a deep-cover Soviet killer without portfolio. At least without a killer’s portfolio. Delaroche does have a portfolio of sorts he is also a painter who takes his art seriously. Indeed, there are many layers to Delaroche, and I liked the fact that as many things as Silva shows us, we never quite find out what makes the assassin tick. The one gripe I have with this book, and this is really not against Daniel Silva specifically, but to the authors of all thrillers, is the need to make up what I call the “Presidential cast of characters,” that is “President Smith,” “Secretary of State Jones,” etc. If they’re peripheral characters, write ’em out, I say. Use real politicians. It worked marvelously for Frederick Forsythe in The Day of the Jackal. It could have worked here. At any rate, the real story in The Mark of the Assassin is the assassin himself. Reviewed by James Neal Webb.

Perhaps no one is more well known or respected as a modern day master of crime fiction than Robert B. Parker. Like Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett, Parker has mastered the art of the hardboiled detective novel. He is best known for his tough but sensitive Boston private investigator Spenser. He has written over 20 Spenser novels, which spawned the 1980s television show Spenser: For Hire. With his latest book, Family Honor, Parker introduces an entirely new character a female P.

I. named Sunny Randall.

Sunny is a complex character: a former cop, college graduate, divorcee, and aspiring painter. Sunny is hired by a wealthy family to discreetly locate their daughter, who has run away. Tracking down the runaway Millicent does not prove to be difficult, but deciding what to do with her does. It appears that Millie’s problems are far greater than running away, and Sunny is now caught in the middle.

Unsure of what to do with Millie, Sunny finds herself acting as both bodyguard and surrogate mother, and occasionally as a moving target. It seems that a certain group of mobsters is also looking for Millie, and they have no problem taking out one female detective to get her. Fortunately Sunny is not without resources. Her ex-husband, Richie, is himself the son of a mobster, and her best friend, Spike, is an ominously dangerous gay man. With their help, Sunny delves into the mystery of why everyone wants Millie, all the while trying to teach her how to be a strong, independent woman.

Family Honor introduces what may be an ongoing series. Parker has created a number of engaging and well-thought-out characters in Sunny, Richie, and Spike. His writing style is short and to the point with very little extraneous exposition. And as with his other novels, the true joy of reading Parker is the stellar dialog. He writes the way people speak. There are no long speeches, no overly emotional outbursts; he writes it like it is. So intelligent and cutting are Sunny’s comments and come-backs, you’ll find yourself wishing you were as quick on your feet.

Family Honor is an enjoyable book that focuses more on the characters and their development than it does on the mystery surrounding them. While the mystery is interesting, it serves merely as a catalyst to propel the characters through the story. You may begin Family Honor for the story line, but you’ll finish it for Sunny Randall.

Wes Breazeale grew up in Robert B. Parker’s turf and now does research for a college in Oregon.

Is Nashville becoming a hotbed of mystery and suspense? You’d think so, judging from these two mysteries, both written by Nashville writers. Steven Womack’s Dirty Money doesn’t actually take place in Music City it takes place in and around Reno, Nevada but his private investigator, Harry James Denton, is from Nashville and the book is filled with references to the city.

Readers of Womack’s previous mysteries are familiar with Denton, a middle-aged investigative reporter-turned-private investigator who solves his cases with guile and persistence rather than violence or marksmanship.

Denton’s story begins as he is traveling west to be with a former girlfriend who is about to have his baby. Along the way, he is robbed by a pair of redneck road warriors who send him packing to a small town hospital where he meets a striking redhead who drives him into Reno and into the arms of his former girlfriend.

While visiting his ex and waiting for the baby to be born, Denton gets roped into going undercover at the Mustang Ranch, a world-famous house of prostitution, to gather evidence of a money laundering operation. A murder takes place at the brothel, and Denton is taken into custody by police as the prime suspect.

The remainder of the book consists of Denton’s efforts to clear himself, solve the money laundering case, wrap up his relationship with his ex, plant a seed of hope with the redhead, and then get the heck back to Nashville.

With Harry James Denton, Womack has created one of the most interesting detectives to surface in a long time. Denton is no slug ’em, cuff ’em up, and toss ’em into the slammer detective. He is a man with serious issues. Although he has a former girlfriend, flirts with the redhead, and is attracted to one of the prostitutes at the bordello, he seems to have problems with intimacy.

Womack is an excellent writer who knows how to merge character with plot, and fact with fantasy. Fans of Harry James Denton will hope to see him again and again. In Fall to Pieces, Cecelia Tishy’s detective is a former cop reporter named Kate Banning who gets trapped into working as an investigator for a country singer whose life has been threatened by a series of suspicious accidents. It’s Banning’s job to find out who wants the singer dead and why.

This mystery takes place in Nashville, and it is filled with references to the music industry. Tishy’s writing is crisp, and her character development is excellent. She doesn’t tell you who Kate Banning is she shows you in bits and pieces. Her research is off the mark on occasion (the Jordanaires provided background vocals for Elvis and were not his sidemen), but those are minor errors. Tishy is an English professor at Vanderbilt University, and her occasional missteps in the dirty world of country music can be overlooked.

Female detectives have become a staple of mystery novels, but Kate Banning is unique in many ways. She provides a female perspective on issues that previously have been the sole preserve of males.

I cannot recall ever suggesting that readers tackle two novels, one right after the other, but I am doing so in this case. Even better, I recommend that readers begin a letter writing campaign directed at Womack and Tishy. Somehow they need to figure out a way to get Kate Banning and Harry James Denton together in the same book, perhaps as investigative opponents. One thing is for certain: Kate Banning could help Harry James Denton with those intimacy issues.

Nashville writer James L. Dickerson is the author of a history about women in the music industry, Women on Top (Watson-Guptill), and a true-crime mystery, Dixie’s Dirty Secret (M.

E. Sharpe).