What distinguishes the recent work of Michael Connelly from other current mysteries is his emphasis on the psychological terrain of his central character, Detective Harry Bosch. A man ravaged by inner demons, Bosch struggles to control them without losing grasp of his latest case. In Angels Flight, Bosch is confronted with his most difficult challenge to date: a prominent African-American attorney’s murder.

Set in a racially polarized Los Angeles, Howard Elias’s shooting threatens to trigger a series of bloody race riots unless Bosch can find the murderer. Elias, a civil rights attorney, has a reputation as an enemy of the LAPD, arguing countless lawsuits against the embattled police force. When Elias and a woman are found dead on a train car, Bosch is recruited by police brass to solve the case as quickly as possible.

Matters are complicated by the fact that Elias was killed just two days before arguing his biggest case against the department. Although the murder resembles a robbery-homicide, certain circumstances point to a possible inside job by rogue cops seeking to silence the black lawyer.

In typical Connelly fashion, there are clever turns and twists in the plot as the city simmers toward a massive racial meltdown. Bosch races against time to find the killers, before everything erupts. His superiors do not want him to turn up any evidence that would implicate the department, but everything suggests that the people involved could be members of the LAPD.

Fans of classic police procedurals will enjoy the well-researched investigation, with its numerous clues, lab findings, legwork, suspects, and astonishing dead-ends. Bosch, walking a tightrope between protesting blacks and fearful whites, seeks the truth despite stonewalling tactics by his department and threats from the black community. With a whiz-bang ending, Bosch uncovers the bitter truth that defies all he has ever believed about his profession or his community. This is sleuthing with smarts and suspense. Connelly’s eighth detective thriller, Angels Flight sets the bar for the standard of this type of fiction even higher and clears it with room to spare.

Most mystery novelists would give their writing hand to have just one successful series. At last count, Edgar Award-winning author Lawrence Block has three a number of cloak-and-dagger espionage novels starring libidinous secret agent Evan Tanner; a darker group of suspense stories featuring alcoholic ex-cop Matthew Scudder; and the whimsical tales of Mrs. Rhodenbarr’s favorite son Bernie, a bookstore owner who moonlights as a cat burglar. Ever the opportunist, Bernie is constantly on the lookout for the unguarded bauble, the unbolted door.

A chance encounter with lovely (and lively) Alice Cottrell affords him the opportunity for some nourishing larceny. It seems Alice is the one-time lover of legendary writer-recluse Gulliver Fairborn, whose Nobody’s Angel was the coming-of-age novel of its generation. At the tender age of 14, Alice moved in with Fairborn, a free spirit some 20 years her senior. Three years later, inexplicably, Fairborn disappeared, his only contact with the outside world an occasional letter and manuscript sent to his literary agent, one Anthea Landau. If these letters could be obtained, they would be worth a small fortune. Or so Alice says . . .

Shortly afterward, in another part of Manhattan, one Jeffrey Peters, aka Peter Jeffries, aka Bernie Rhodenbarr, picks the locks of Anthea Landau’s apartment. To Bernie’s chagrin, the agent lies dead in her bed freshly dispatched, judging by the aroma of gunpowder in the closed room. A pounding at the door convinces our intrepid intruder that he must make good his getaway.

Sadly, Bernie is not as quick of foot as of wit. He is apprehended in mid-escape, and cuffed and dragged downtown to be arraigned for murder. Things take a turn for the weird when the lovely Alice turns out to be one Karen Kassenmeier, a professional thief . . . and get weirder still when the body of Karen Kassenmeier turns up on the floor of Bernie’s apartment. Red herrings abound, everyone has a secret (or two, or three), and nothing is what it seems. With the constabulary breathing down his neck, Bernie must extract the proverbial hare from his Homburg, and pronto.

The Burglar in the Rye, the ninth in the Bernie Rhodenbarr series, has a healthy dose of irreverent humor, a classic gather-all-the-suspects-in-one-room climax, and of course more twists than Lombard Street.

Bruce Tierney is a writer, songwriter, and art dealer.

Archy McNally, Lawrence Sanders’s sleuth in McNally’s Dilemma, takes the call one minute before he turns off his machine at midnight. It is his old friend Melva, with some bad news. Geoff Williams, erstwhile tennis pro, four-flusher cad, and husband to Melva, has met an untimely end a bullet through his chest. Melva has called Archy to report the murder and to confess that she did it. Of course, Archy and we have been around murder mysteries long enough to know that the murderer is never, never, the one who claims she did it at the beginning of the book. But unraveling the plot takes us through Sanders’s special domain, the Palm Beach cafe society set, and the parasites who live off of it.

Archy’s first job is to find Melva’s daughter and fetch her back to the murder scene. She turns out, of course, to be the requisite gorgeous twentysomething. And, of course, she finds Archy irresistible, even though he is older. In the end Archy finds the real murderer, returns to his long-term girlfriend, and enjoys his gibson at the Pelican Club, ready for the next adventure.

It may be a formula, but this book is packed with charm. There is, for one thing, Archy himself: sardonic, sartorially challenged, the son of the best society lawyer in Palm Beach, booted out of Yale Law, and now a private eye. Think Travis McGee in an ascot. He is fond enough of unusual hats that he has berets custom made in Connecticut in puce, among other colors. He also has enough quirky wise cracks to rival a Groucho Marx movie: The music was pure disco, the beat of which has always reminded me of how the ogre’s heart must have sounded when he chased Jack around the beanstalk. Even the minor characters especially the minor characters are loaded with the eccentricity and texture that make you think Sanders just can’t be making this up.

Americans, I’m told, love to read about rich people. If that is true, then Sanders has hit his market, but with a delightful band of villains and friends in this picaresque, charming whodunit. ¦ John Foster is an attorney in Columbia, South Carolina.

Elvis has left the city L.

A. Requiem, the eighth and newest Elvis Cole novel by Robert Crais, is like a bride: it brings something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. The old is the familiar pairing of Los Angeles private eye Elvis Cole and his partner, the violent yet noble Joe Pike. The new is that much of this story is told in third-person some from Pike’s point of view and some from an omniscient narrator’s.

The borrowed is the fact that Crais has dipped into other genres to enliven this book. Departing from his standard mystery novel style, he has added a sinister and suspenseful thriller plot element . . . which of course we won’t reveal here. And the blue is the uniform of the LAPD, which plays a very large role in the story as both villain and hero.

With seven solid novels behind him, and a growing legion of fans, why has Crais departed so boldly from what has worked before? Well, like his hero, he doesn’t mind taking risks, if it’s in a good cause. I wanted to write a deeper book, Crais says. The characters have been there for seven novels, but I felt the need to expand. I wanted to push out the boundaries of the way I write detective novels. I wanted a larger book. In length, complexity, depth, and seriousness, he has succeeded. The many twists of the complicated plot take Elvis and Joe deep into Pike’s past, a past that before this book has been only darkly hinted at. Joe’s backstory has been growing for me, Crais says. In general terms I’ve always known the type of home he grew up in. But the specifics of it I created when I was writing. That was one of the many adventures on this book. Elvis’s ongoing relationship with Louisiana lawyer Lucy Chenier also goes through some adventures, as Pike’s problems intrude on her and Elvis in new and dangerous ways. In this book, Elvis has to make tougher personal choices than he’s ever had to make, Crais hints. And Lucy is learning things about Joe that scare her, and then she drops that on Elvis. He has to make a choice. Negotiating Elvis’s psyche and developing a detailed history for the fascinating Pike, a former Marine and LAPD officer, was only one of the challenges Crais faced. The amount of investigative detail in L.

A. Requiem adds police procedural to mystery and thriller in the cocktail that is the book. I’ve done ride-alongs with LAPD for years now, he says. But for this book I learned more about more areas. I needed to know how homicide detectives work at a crime scene, how they interrelate with coroner’s investigators, how Robbery-Homicide differs from a precinct’s homicide desk, how a task force is structured. To assist in that research, Crais called on the fruits of his first writing career for television. After moving to Los Angeles from Louisiana in the 1970s, Crais worked on scripts for many TV shows, including Quincy, Baretta, L.

A. Law, Hill Street Blues, and Miami Vice. The law enforcement contacts and knowledge of police work that he gained have proved invaluable.

Also useful was his family history. Three uncles and two cousins are or were police officers. I know that under the badge police are just like anyone else, except they know a kind of cynical truth about people that they carry with them. This cynicism contrasts sharply with Cole’s trademark optimism. His skills are not in clues and legwork, but in reading people, understanding motivations. Cole can smash down a door or take a villain with the best of them, but his tender side is more evident than his sidearm.

And after meeting Crais, who says all my characters in one way or the other are me, one understands why. Elvis is the work he has aimed for since he was shooting Super-8 movies in his back yard in Baton Rouge, since he wrote short story after short story and got endless rejection slips. Elvis works out, likes to cook, and collects Disneyana. So does Crais.

What is not so apparent is that, as Crais puts it, Joe is me, too. I can use Joe to explore some of the darker corners of me. In this book, though, I reveal to people that Joe is a very human, albeit controlled, person. Most people would point to Joe’s past and say that he’s not a law-abiding person. But Joe is a good man. Crais grew up in Baton Rouge, a town he describes as solidly blue-collar, and one in which a creative kid who writes comics and short stories and who films movies is the craziest kid in town. People don’t grow up there wanting to become writers. Crais broke that mold. When you’re 16 years old and you read Raymond Chandler for the first time, it knocks you over to think that a human being can do that on a page. It’s like making magic. I said that’s what I want to do. He moved to Los Angeles after a series of odd jobs. He studied sample television scripts for format. Without a TV in his house, he hung out in department stores, watching shows and taking notes. Then I started writing scripts, I found an agent through a friend, and eventually one of them sold. But novels were still on his mind, two dust-gathering, self-described horrible manuscripts notwithstanding. Then, in 1985, in a real-life plot twist, Crais’s father passed away.

My mom was terrified. They had been married for 42 years and she had never written a check, never paid a bill. And we went through a period where our roles were reversed. It was while I was wrestling with that that Elvis Cole was born. In The Monkey’s Raincoat, published in 1987, Cole takes a woman named Ellen Lang under his wing after her husband is murdered and her son kidnapped. I like to think that I was given a Calvin and Hobbes transmogrifier that converted me into Elvis and my mom into Ellen Lang, Crais says. That sense of intimate caring, that feeling of assurance that comes through even amid Cole’s wisecracks and attitude, is what makes the series so successful.

L.

A. Requiem ends with Cole musing on the city he calls home, the city that, more than in any other Crais novel, plays a role equal to any character’s. Cole almost revels in the transitory nature of the urban sprawl that is Los Angeles. Crais has the same feelings.

All that stuff that he says at the end, that’s my L.

A., he says. People come here to make their dreams come true. That’s why it’s such a powerful and edgy place. There’s such a sense of transition. Things have to change. Even detectives in novels and the way they are written. Life for Elvis will only get more complicated, Crais concludes.

James Buckley, Jr., is an associate editor with NFL Publishing in Los Angeles. His latest sports book for kids, Eyewitness Football, will be published in September by DK Publishing and the NFL.

Detective Sergeant Romulus Poe, part Paiute Indian and part Mormon, is the lead character in the first in a new series by Los Angeles author Faye Kellerman, known best for her Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus mysteries. Set in Las Vegas, Moon Music is a tour of the desert city as much more than the grown-up playground of today. Decker is the lead investigator in a series of grisly show girl murders. His primary love interest and investigative partner is Hindu pathologist Dr. Rukmani Kalil who, along with Poe’s twin brother Remus, slightly batty Mother, Emma, and high school sweetheart, Alison Jensen, allow Kellerman to introduce themes of mysticism and fantasy along with her respect for religion as a motivating and moderating force in human dynamics.

In an eerie prescience, the plot of Moon Music is entwined with Nevada’s infamous Yucca Flat atomic test site. Emma Poe reminisces about her senior class trip to see the mushroom cloud, They took us there very early in the morning . . . before dawn. It was dark and cold and a little spooky. We had to hunker down in these troughs that the soldiers had dug a couple of years before. We were just these kids, giggling and telling scary things because we were nervous. But we were excited too. . . . Ten! Nine! Eight, seven, six . . . even with my eyes closed and covered with my arms, I still saw this . . . this fantastic burst of light shooting through my skin . . . like God was recreating the universe. And then . . . at the same time . . . you felt this big blast of heat . . . sizzling through your clothes. And when they said you could look up, you did. And there it was. Right there in the sky . . . that famous mushroom cloud . . . what a thrill! Indeed. What a thrill. Not every character in the book is enchanted with the nuclear age, We explode something like a thousand bombs into our atmosphere after exploding only two bombs in enemy territory. Now you tell me. Who came out better, huh? Meticulous documentation of the early detonations at the Nevada Proving Ground are a stark reminder of the days of public innocence the days when support for the atomic program was considered a certain patriotic duty, On January 27, 1951 a one-kiloton bomb named Able was dropped above Frenchman Flat . . . More bombs followed, each one christened as if the government were birthing an infant . . . from Able in 1951 to . . . Little Feller I in July of 1962. Faye Kellerman’s talent for deeply complex characters, riveting action, and thorough research keeps us sitting on the edge of our seat, wide awake late at night. Moon Music is an energizing, terrifying, thought provoking introduction to the Las Vegas of Romulus Poe and Rukmani Kalil. You’ll want to go back often and stay late.

Donna Headrick is a researcher and a columnist for the IntrepidNetReporter.

It often seems that certain contemporary mystery writers own a city: Robert Parker owns Boston, J.

A. Jance owns Seattle, Robert Crais owns L.

A., and Sara Paretsky owns Chicago. By the same token, T. Jefferson Parker owns Orange County, California. Each of his seven previous novels, from the groundbreaking Laguna Heat to the recent Blue Hour displays his familiarity with and affinity for the sun-drenched communities of California’s south coast. Parker’s latest novel, Red Light, picks up where The Blue Hour left off, chronicling the life and times of Sheriff’s Investigator Merci Rayborn.

It has been two years since the death of Merci’s partner Tim Hess, her sometime lover and the father of her child. In the intervening months, Mercy has kept her nose to the grindstone at work, while still trying to find the time to be a good mother. She has only recently started keeping company with a member of the opposite sex, another sheriff, and the road has been somewhat rocky to say the least. When all of the clues in the murder of a young prostitute seem to point to her newfound sweetheart as the perpetrator, Merci is faced with the tough decision of telling what she knows, information which will further implicate her boyfriend, perhaps beyond any hope of extrication. The plot thickens as Merci realizes the details of a 30-year-old murder bear a striking similarity to her current case; to confound matters further, fingerprints found at the scene of the current crime appear to belong to someone who has been presumed dead for years.

The further Merci digs, the more she begins to believe the two cases are intertwined, and that the answers she seeks may in fact lie with some of the most highly placed individuals in the current law enforcement administration. Somehow she must make her case without alerting the powers-that-be to her strategy.

As in each of his previous books, Parker has given us a thoroughly human protagonist, flawed but ultimately moral. Merci Rayborn is among his best; as such, she has the distinction of being the only character that has appeared in more than one of his novels. Red Light, like its predecessors, is a book for reading in one sitting, so block out a long evening free of distractions; you won’t want to put it down.

Bruce Tierney is a writer in Nashville.

In The Twisted Root by Anne Perry agent of enquiry William Monk is asked by Lucius Stourbridge to help locate his missing fiance, the widow, Mrs. Miriam Gardiner. Miriam departed a gathering at the Stourbridge estate and, along with coachman Treadwell and the coach and team, vanished. Lucius is crushed; his parents and maternal uncle Aiden Campbell act similarly. But they reveal that Miriam was perhaps a step down in station, over-familiar with servants, and at least nine years their son’s senior.

Presently, the coachman is found murdered, and Miriam is presumed the killer. Monk, an ex-police officer fired for insubordination, believes there is more to the crime. With the assistance of his new wife Hester Latterly, Monk pursues an investigation that, with classic Anne Perry twists, leads into Victorian bedrooms and, eventually, the courtroom. ¦ Tom Corcoran is the Florida-based author of The Mango Opera and the new Florida Keys mystery, Gumbo Limbo, both from St. Martin’s.