'Empire' scribe Locke writes a mystery

There's no escaping crime, whether it's in a place called Pleasantville or a suburban New Jersey town. Charles Finch scopes out a new batch of mystery and crime titles.

Pleasantville

By Attica Locke

Harper, 418 pp.

***½ out of four

My early reviewer's edition of Pleasantville casually mentions that Attica Locke is "a writer and co-producer on the upcoming Fox drama Empire." Well, it arrived, and now Locke is presumably on a private island sipping champagne and contemplating the hit show's next season – which makes this a melancholy review to write, because the book is splendid, and now who knows when another might come along? It's Locke's second featuring Jay Porter, a smart, lonely and decent lawyer in 1990s Houston. Pleasantville, his predominantly black neighborhood, has a missing teenage girl, the third such disappearance; a mayoral runoff complicates the search for her. What ensues is a thoughtful, penetrating mystery. In vision, if not in tone, Locke is another Louise Penny, taking a small community and showing through a crime how its politics and enmities and debts are related.

Where They Found Her

By Kimberly McCreight

Harper, 324 pp.

***

"It could happen to you!" is a reliable thriller setup – selling suburban women, statistically the most common American readers, a shivery vision of just how fast their comfortable worlds might disintegrate. Here Kimberly McCreight offers another swift, lurid tale of first-world calamity, in this case the discovery of a dead baby in an idyllic New Jersey town. The narrative of the subsequent investigation alternates among several characters, including Molly, a reporter on the scene who has herself lost a child, and Sandy, a teenager with a missing mom. Where They Found Her isn't as tight as McCreight's debut, Reconstructing Amelia, and its solution pushes one twist past plausibility, but it's suspenseful, and agreeably fluent in the text messages and Internet comments where the dramas of modern life play out. Is it sordid? Yep, but sordid sells, and McCreight is quickly rising into a league with the best purveyors of the stuff, from Jodi Picoult to Harlan Coben.

Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s

By Ross Macdonald

Library of America, 960 pp.

****

The one thing this superb collection can't quite claim is originality: Macdonald (1915-1983) was part of the second generation of hardboiled novelists, heir to the pioneering work of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and he worked faithfully to their templates. But he did it brilliantly, arguably better than they did. All four of these novels are excellent whodunits, featuring the wry, tough, honest voice of Lew Archer, the California private eye always trying to hold the line of his principles against the seedy worlds he enters for his clients. The pick of the bunch is The Way Some People Die, a gangster story. The Barbarous Coast and The Doomsters are just as consuming, while The Galton Case is notable for the nuance and moral difficulty that marked MacDonald's later work. His minor characters are especially wonderful, nearly Shakespearean – each more convinced of their own existence than Archer's, each a bursting novel unto themselves.

The Hidden Man

By Robin Blake

Minotaur, 344 pp.

***

One of the pleasures of being a mystery reader is the way a series can change and grow. Robin Blake's first two novels about Fidelis and Cragg – a doctor and a coroner in northern England during the 1740s – had a nice command of the period, but The Hidden Man is a cut above them, smart, absorbing, funny, and beautifully researched. It's about the death of a man named Pimbo, who was in charge of investing the budget for a grand festival held every 20 years. What seems a local crime soon takes on all sorts of broader issues, however, including Britain's slave trade and, in the book's most interesting scenes, the emerging concept of banking. Blake's protagonists lack an edge, but when he surrounds them with such vivid history that matters less, and the book's intriguing final lines suggest that the series still has new directions in which to develop.

Charles Finch writes the Charles Lenox mystery series.