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.

"The sacred and the dispossessed meeting on the streets," is the way Sara Paretsky describes her vision of Ghost Country. Paretsky enthusiasts who look forward to each V.I. Warshawski mystery will find a different sort of book, but one that will not disappoint. When I realized the book was about homeless women on the streets of Chicago, I wasn't sure I wanted a dose of sociology for bedside reading. But from the first page, where a has-been diva wrestles with her demons, I was hooked solidly, for all 386 pages of excitement, wit, violence, romance, and pathos.

The action centers on an underground garage wall at the Hotel Pleiades in Chicago. A homeless woman has set up a cardboard box home and a shrine beside a crack in a wall that weeps rusty water which she believes is the blood of the Virgin Mary. Other homeless women join her. The hotel is in a quandary. They can't afford the publicity of ousting women who may, just possibly, be practicing their religion. Yet hotel guests are complaining. The diva, whom we met on page one, joins the homeless women in her silk designer suit, somewhat soiled by now, and Italian heels. Once a world renowned opera singer, she has been "tough loved" out of her wealthy twin brother's house because of her problems with alcohol (and for running up $40,000 on his credit card). Mara Stonds, sister of the hotel's lawyer and illegitimate granddaughter of Dr. Abraham Stonds, eminent neurosurgeon, ends up at the wall, too. Against his better judgment, Dr. Stonds has taken in his daughter's baby, calling her Mara, which means "for the Lord has dealt bitterly with me." The cast of homeless women is buffeted about by do-gooders at Hagar's House a refuge for homeless women by church officials, mental health authorities, Dr. Stonds's hospital, and by the police. The church on Orleans Street holds Bible lessons for the homeless women, lessons they must attend if they are to get a bed for the night. The women's powerlessness is frightening and real, and the twists and turns of Ghost Country entertaining and thought provoking. I won't look at bag ladies in my own city the same way ever again.

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.

Murder, mayhem, lust, and betrayal are rife among Oxford's ivory towers in Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost. Set in the Restoration period, this masterfully crafted historical mystery is about how different people perceive and interpret a ghastly murder and its aftermath. As such, it is more of a literary exercise than a straight-forward mystery and one for which the diligent reader will be richly rewarded.

The murder of Robert Grove, fellow of New College, is recounted by four narrators, each with his own personal baggage and preconceptions about who perpetrated the crime. Marco da Cola, a foppish Venetian, is an expatriate in search of his father's debtors or so he professes. Jack Prescott is a paranoid schizophrenic bent on redressing his father's sullied name. The highly arrogant cryptographer, John Wallis, is on a similar quest to revenge the death of his companion. And the hermit-like Anthony Wood proffers his own account of the murder, all the while entranced by Sarah Blundy, a servant with strangely mystical qualities. Although she never narrates, Sarah is a ubiquitous presence, influencing and inciting each narrator with her stoic beauty, insolence and free-thinking notions.

Each narrator embodies Age-of-Enlightenment paradoxes and, to some degree, each is corrupted by prejudice and blinded by obsession. Emerging scientific theories and revolutionary insights clash with old-world superstitions. Characterizations are based on historical persons, and harrowing details (such as graphic scenes of medical experimentation) abound.

True to its title, the book itself is a fingerpost, playfully guiding the reader through philosophical conundrums concerning the nature of knowledge and truth while weaving an entertaining tale of gothic proportions. Among Oxford's dreaming spires, there lurks a brooding malevolence the perfect setting in which an aura of cloistered intrigue rings true. Epic-novel aficionados will not be disappointed.

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.

This reviewer was half-hoping that Flavia De Luce, the brilliant toxicologist of Alan Bradley’s delicious new mystery, would be a cheerful murderess on the other end of the age spectrum from the old ladies in Arsenic and Old Lace. But no, save getting mild revenge on a tormentor, 11-year-old Flavia uses her knowledge of poisons for good. For example, to find out why that red-headed chap dropped dead in her father’s cucumber patch, right beneath her bedroom window.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is set in post-World War II Britain, a time of a certain dinginess, in a great country estate where the sad and widowed Mr. De Luce lives with his three daughters and his stamp collection. As Flavia tries to determine what’s causing the strange events around her home, Bradley delights the reader with lots of twists, turns and red herrings—and heaps of English atmosphere. There are unkind older sisters and dotty spinsterish librarians and a devoted, war-wounded factotum. The eventual villain is delightfully creepy and sadistic enough for you to want him thrown in the slammer for a long time—in a movie version, he’d be played by David Thewlis. At the center of it all is precocious, funny, slightly annoying Flavia, with her mousy brown braids and knack for getting out of tight spots (it helps to be little). Amid all the fun, Bradley allows moments of poignancy. Caught in one of those tight spots, Flavia believes no one in her Britishly undemonstrative family loves her. Maybe her mother loved her once, but the restless Harriet left Flavia when she was a year old and disappeared on one of her adventures.

Though Flavia narrates the story, the voice seems too adult for even a very bright child. The reader can easily imagine this as a tale recounted by a jolly, eccentric old lady, maybe a retired Oxford don, to a cub reporter from The Guardian. But it matters not. Readers will want more, much more, of Flavia de Luce!

Arlene McKanic picks her poison in Jamaica, New York.

In 1997, Lee Child's Killing Floor won two Best First Mystery awards. Child's third Jack Reacher mystery, Tripwire, maintains his quality and accelerates his thriller-style plotting.

After a career in military police investigation, Jack Reacher opted for a lifestyle removed from the Army's constant-boss, constant-schedule routine. He began wandering the country, living a Teflon life with no paper trail, no credit cards. Tripwire finds him in laid-back Key West, digging swimming pools by day, moonlighting as a bouncer in a nude dance club. But Costello, a New York private eye working for a mysterious Mrs. Jacob, shows up looking for him. Then two toughs show up looking for him. Reacher knows none of them, or their reasons for contacting him. Too soon he discovers that the toughs have found Costello, in ugly fashion. Reacher sees no choice. He must abandon his idyllic existence and confront the mystery head-on.

Child's complex tale explores a violent underworld and the determination of a tough, thoughtful main character. Throughout this cross-country cat-and-mouse tale, the author's spare style reveals telling details: layers of intrigue, poignant moments, hideous crimes, and ingenious solutions.

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

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.

Vikas Swarup’s Six Suspects is not an ordinary murder mystery. Vicky Rai is as awful a reprobate as an author could create—“the poster boy for sleaze in this country.” Insider trading, defrauding investors, bribery and tax evasion are just the beginning. He lacks any remorse for having run down six people while drunkenly driving the swanky BMW his father gave him for a birthday present. As a follow-up, he kills two bucks on a wildlife sanctuary. Finally, in a crowded bar, he shoots a beautiful bartender named Ruby Gill point-blank in the face, angry that she wouldn’t serve him another drink after closing time.

If there’s anything Vicky excels at, it’s escaping punishment. After a five-year trial, he’s found not guilty of this grotesque crime. But while celebrating his acquittal at a blowout bash, he is shot to death. The police seal the scene and search all the guests, identifying six suspects, each of whom is carrying a different gun.

And it’s here that Swarup’s story takes off. Not only does he reject the standard structure for a crime novel, there is also no traditional detective or brave hero to be found. Rather than planting clues and flashing red herrings, he tells the tale of each of the suspects—a career bureaucrat suffering from split personality disorder (half the time he believes he’s Mahatma Gandhi), a scary-naïve American tourist who’s come to India thinking he’s getting a mail-order bride, a cell phone thief, a tribesman from the Andaman Islands, a sexy Bollywood actress, and Vicky’s own father.

Swarup has taken an ambitious step with this book, and it’s a fascinating and complex read, as well as a journey through diverse views of modern India. Rich with culture, this novel should not be left out of any holidaymaker’s suitcase.

Tasha Alexander is the author of And Only to Deceive.