Timothy Dumas, former managing editor of Greentown News, is obsessed with the most infamous murder mystery to occur in America’s wealthiest community, Greenwich, Connecticut. For years, Dumas has written about the headline-grabbing slaying of 15-year-old Martha Moxley, found beaten to death on the lawn of her home on Halloween, 1975. Now, with Greentown, Dumas offers one final examination of the case.

The brutal murder of the young all-American beauty, as chronicled by Dumas, begins with a no-holds-barred overview of Ground Zero, the remote Belle Haven community of Greenwich, nicknamed “Greentown,” a place where nothing is as it seems. Something evil and decadent lurks in the rows of gabled mansions along the tree-lined streets in the monied enclave, home of the nation’s tony jet set, Hollywood royalty, and political power brokers. Dumas shatters the myth of this suburban Shangri-La with his probing, uncompromising look at the girl’s last hours and the crime’s aftermath. However, it is the author’s crisp, lean writing style that lends the work its power. Dumas’s relentless search does not prevent him from finding the underlying humanity of the principals in this sordid event. The author ventures bravely into the minds of each of the key players, using their individual voices to weave a colorful tapestry of grief, deception, and hypocrisy. The writer is at his best when he allows them to speak their deepest fears and secrets. Some elements of the case surfaced immediately police disclosed that the murder weapon was a woman’s golf club and that the last person to see the dead girl was Thomas Skekel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy. Others, however, remain a mystery. With the complete revelation of the grisly murder, the Belle Haven community, long protective of its reputation and distrustful of outsiders, closed ranks, stymying the police investigation. Every lead rushed to a frustrating dead end, witnesses suddenly became strangely mute, suspects were captured and quickly released.

To his credit, Dumas veers away from the type of doting fascination with the rich and famous that writer Dominick Dunne exhibited in his popular A Season in Purgatory, which is also based on the Moxley case. Instead, Dumas focuses his attention on the seemingly ill-fitting puzzle pieces of the unsolved murder. Why would a killer choose the carefree, fun-loving Moxley teen for such a gruesome death? Why was the clumsy six-iron used as a murder weapon? How did a stranger get past the defenses of the heavily guarded Belle Haven community? Was it an inside job? In short, Dumas’s Greentown is the perfect example of what a treasure trove of research can become in the hands of a capable writer.

Reviewed by Robert Fleming.

A title wave of beach paperbacks Whether you’re contemplating a trip to an exotic beach, or planning to spend the warm weather months in the back yard, you’ll want to bring along that most necessary of seasonal accouterments. No, not sunscreen. We’re talking summer reading. Especially the easy-to-tote paperback variety. A hardcover sensation, John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story, literally spent years on bestseller lists. This month the 1994 title at last debuts in soft cover. Never mind that Clint Eastwood’s movie version has come and gone. If you haven’t read this account of life and death and murder Savannah-style, replete with its parade of beguiling eccentrics, you’re in for a mint-julep-flavored treat. Southern accents and sensibilities also abound in Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (HarperCollins, $14, 0060928336). Flashing back and forth from the 1990s to the 1960s, the book explores Siddalee’s efforts to understand her seemingly incomprehensible mother, the Louisiana magnolia Viviane, and her three chums. Booted out of a Shirley Temple lookalike contest when they were just six, the girls spent their college years blazing a bourbon-splattered trail, buffered by the motto (from a Billie Holiday tune), smoke, drink, don’t think. As much a paean to sisterhood as it is a mother-daughter tale, Ya-Ya is a kind of follow-up to Wells’s much darker first novel, Little Altars Everywhere, (HarperCollins, $13, 0060976845), and is being developed for a movie by Bette Midler’s production company. Yet another girly story is recounted in Bridget Jones’s Diary (Penguin, $12.95, 014028009X). Helen Fielding’s book which originated as a column in a London newspaper is the first-person odyssey of the thirtysomething Bridget, who is obsessed with such ’90s issues as learning to program her VCR, finding Mr. Right, and, of course, weight loss (in one year she manages to lose 72 pounds . . . and to gain 74). The producers of the quirky Four Weddings and a Funeral plan a movie version of the quirky Bridget.

Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel, by first-time novelist Arthur S. Golden, may also be headed for the screen with Steven Spielberg’s involvement. For now, enjoy it in print (Vintage, $14, 0679781587), as the geisha Sayuri details her metamorphosis from peasant child she was nine when her widowed father sold her to a geisha house to her prewar rise as a leading geisha and on to her role as mistress to a power-broker. Golden spent nine years researching and writing this intricately detailed saga, which takes us on a memorable, eye-opening journey.

And last but not least, we mustn’t forget Margaret Mitchell’s monumental (and perennially best-selling) classic, Gone with the Wind (Warner Books, $7.99, 0446365386).

Hollywood journalist Pat H. Broeske is also a biographer who has chronicled the lives of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley.

The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime As a former literary editor for Outside magazine, author Miles Harvey knows a thing or two about the importance of maps when it comes to defining a subject. But in 1995 when he came across the true story in the Chicago Tribune of Gilbert Joseph Bland, Jr., a contemporary map thief whose cartographic crime spree made him the most famous such bandit in American history, Harvey was more than intrigued. So, as any adventurer is apt to do, he set off down the uncharted trail of this “Al Capone of cartography” to learn why a South Florida antiques dealer would become master map thief. What began as a lengthy feature article for Outside turned into four years of researching the methods and motives of his enigmatic subject, thus The Island Of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime became a readable chart of these unusual crimes and the man behind them.

Visualize if you will a contemporary map thief. Beyond generating an image of a tweedy, nondescript, and somewhat less gadgetry-enhanced version of James Bond, it’s more of a challenge to imagine why someone would habitually pilfer hundreds of old maps from prominent research libraries across Canada and the United States. In his investigations, Harvey descends into the intriguing subculture of map collectors and experts and the peripheral eccentrics who encountered Bland as he slipped undetected through the doors of various libraries with centuries-old maps of all kinds hidden on his person. Most interesting are the many obscure side trips Harvey makes during his trail of investigations which, written in highly descriptive and well-paced prose, create the mood of a dimly lit library during a thunderstorm. As we learn with each incident involving maps Harvey encounters, behind every map is a significant story. The story behind the greatest map thief in America is an entertaining adventure in history, humanity, and the fascinating role cartography plays in it all. Jamie McAlister writes from his home in Charleston, South Carolina.

Though it will probably be shelved in the True Crime section, Disco Bloodbath is only ostensibly about ultrahip New York party promoter Michael Alig’s 1996 co-murder and dismemberment of his drug dealer. The gruesome act and Alig’s subsequent imprisonment bookends what is really more of a fascinating memoir by St. James, an Alig friend/foe and well-known gadfly on the city’s predominately homosexual nightclub circuit.

Chronicling the scene and all its excesses between the demise of Warhol and the rise of the Club Kids, St. James is the catty tour guide to a Felliniesque netherworld. In it, days are spent deciding which outrageous way to dress or dye your hair for the evening’s activities, Special K is a designer drug and not a breakfast cereal, and the after-party entertainment just might include a middle-aged drag queen pulling fully lit Christmas bulbs out of his (or her) anus. St. James is the epitome of the literary convention known as the unreliable narrator. His recollections (amazing that he even has them, since he admits to being drugged up during much of the period) are filled with subjectivity, petty and pithy personality shredding, and yes a flamboyant queenly bitchiness accentuated by the hefty usage of bold, italic, and all-caps typefaces. But rather than off-putting, this is actually the book’s biggest strength, as St. James’s inimitable voice in full Diva mode rings through loud and clear even if it is a bit shrill at times.

Along the way he introduces many true-life and pathetic (but unforgettable) characters, happy when they’ve schmoozed successfully or gotten a mention in The Village Voice, but desolate when their supply of coke and the latest boy toy have run out, sometimes simultaneously.

So while the title might bring to mind a bad ’70s drive-in flick and no literal carnage takes place on the dance floor populated by has-beens, wannabes, and never-wases, Disco Bloodbath is a journey into a land of strange creatures with bizarre manners. Hmm, maybe they could also put a few copies in the Science Fiction section.

Bob Ruggiero is a freelance entertainment journalist based in Houston.

It is impossible to read The Murder of Helen Jewett and not be reminded of the O.

J. Simpson murder trial. The similarities are striking: a beautiful young woman found murdered, the victim of a brutal slashing; a handsome, prosperous man arrested for the crime; a mad scramble by reporters to reveal every detail of the case; a high-profile trial complete with bungling prosecutors and slick defense attorneys; and finally, a stunning acquittal of the accused.

So why bother reading Patricia Cline Cohen’s account of a 19th-century prostitute when we have O.

J.? Perhaps to understand that history does repeat itself; maybe to realize that elements we find abhorrent about today’s legal system and media coverage have been commonplace since the infancy of our nation; or simply because the demise of Helen Jewett makes for an interesting potboiler.

Cohen is a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and she approaches her subject with the keen eye of an historian. This prosaic style can lead to some dry spots in the text. There is, for instance, more information than most readers need about the history of the sex trade in New York City, the setting for the story. But much of the chronicle of Helen Jewett’s life and violent death is engrossing, and the care Cohen gives to relating each detail paints a vivid portrait of the crime.

Helen Jewett was discovered murdered in her bed on April 10, 1836. Three bloody gashes covered her face, and her body had been set on fire by her assailant. When the flames were extinguished, constables discovered a man’s handkerchief near the bed. Later, a hatchet was found in the back yard. Evidence quickly mounted against Richard P. Robinson, a frequent client and sometime suitor of Jewett. The mercantile clerk, an educated man from an established East Coast family, was arrested, setting the stage for a lurid passion play that enthralled New York and the nation.

Among the more interesting facets of the book is Cohen’s analysis of how the press covered the crime and subsequent trial. Jewett’s murder occurred at the beginning of a circulation war among a dozen or so New York newspapers, many of which used the grisly crime to sell more copies. The intense competition compelled reporters to constantly dig for new information, and some resorted to fabricating evidence and confessions. Even the reputable newspapers were forced to chose between responsible journalism and higher revenues, most settling for the latter.

Actions in the courtroom were equally reprehensible. Cohen shows how the prosecution failed to introduce key evidence, including a series of love letters between Jewett and Robinson. One of the last letters Robinson wrote was threatening in nature. Meanwhile, his trio of high-profile lawyers took courtroom oratory to new heights, mesmerizing the jury. Robinson’s eventual acquittal resulted in the same kind of shock waves as when Simpson was found not guilty.

The Helen Jewett case ultimately fails to match the excitement and emotion generated by the Simpson trial. But readers can come away from Cohen’s book with a deeper historical perspective of the imperfections inherent in the criminal justice system and the press and a realization of how little things have changed in 160 years.

John T. Slania is a writer from Chicago.

Review by Michael Breen The first thing that will strike you after reading No Heroes is the irony of its title. Heroes fill the pages of this book, men and women doing a dirty, dangerous, and often thankless job for little reward. Their quarry are people who have no respect for the government or its laws, and view law enforcement officials as nothing more than targets. Danny Coulson is one of these heroes, a 31-year FBI veteran, serving in numerous roles including the first head of the Hostage Rescue Team (HRT). Though Coulson did go after bank robbers and drug dealers, the heart of this story is the conflict between the FBI and those who rejected the government and used violence to forward their goals. Coulson discusses several anti-government groups, from the black revolutionaries of the 1960s and ’70s to the white supremacist groups of today, and vividly describes the struggle against these forces. It is a deadly contest, one made more difficult by the government’s unceasing efforts to use lawful and non-violent means against opponents who had no such restrictions.

But the struggle against the forces of crime and terror is only half of this story. Coulson also describes the conflict within the Bureau itself. This second war is one of doers vs. drivers. Drivers were those who worried more about rules, their reputations, political maneuvering, bureaucratic infighting, and spelling errors than catching lawbreakers. This tension is a constant in the book, beginning with the ossified late Hoover era administrators and ending with the finger-pointing after the Ruby Ridge debacle. Coulson shows numerous occasions where the drivers’ shortsightedness led to problems and even risked lives. Coulson’s portrayal of his stresses and their cost is powerful, though his writing style may be a little rough he is, after all, first and foremost an FBI agent. But it is this raw voice of experience that makes the book so gripping. Not only a tale of stakeouts, investigations, and sieges, it is a story that engenders a greater appreciation of those who are on the front lines of the war against terrorism.

Michael Breen is a reviewer in Lawrence, Kansas.