Before the poison

In BEFORE THE POISON (Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.99), Peter Robinson refutes the common assumption that romantic suspense is a woman's game. His sensitive narrator, Chris Lowndes, is a true specimen of the lonesome soul who moves into an old house that has a violent history and falls in love with the resident ghost. No sobbing heroine could be more pitiable than Chris, a veteran of decades of writing scores for Hollywood movies. The death of his wife leaves him so brokenhearted that he returns to his native England and retreats to the seclusion of the Yorkshire Dales. "I had a curious sensation that the shy, half-hidden house was waiting for me, that it had been waiting for some time," Chris says when he takes possession of the 18th-century mansion he has bought long-distance, on the strength of a few photographs. But while the real estate agent assures him no one has ever seen an apparition on the property, she neglects to explain that a former resident, Grace Fox, was hanged in 1953 for poisoning her husband. Once acquainted with the lurid details of the crime - especially Grace's scandalous affair with a local youth - Chris begins to suspect she was punished for her loose morals and might even have been innocent of murder. Unlike Chief Inspector Alan Banks, the hero of Robinson's popular detective novels, Chris hasn't the resources to conduct a formal investigation. Yet he does an outstanding job of sifting truth from gossip, traveling to London, Paris and even South Africa to interview people with firsthand knowledge of the eminent Dr. Ernest Fox and his beautiful young wife. There's a point, though, when curiosity becomes obsession, and those who care about Chris start to fear for his sanity. Robinson outdoes Daphne du Maurier in creating the proper atmosphere for the imaginative fancies of a grief-stricken man. Winds wail, snows fall and floorboards creak, accompanied by the melancholy strains of the sonata Chris is composing on Grace's grand piano. But it's not all shadows on the wall and creepy sound effects. Once Chris gets his hands on Grace's journals, written when she was a battlefield nurse in World War II, the ghostly revenant whose presence he feels in the house is swept aside by the vital woman who emerges from these pages. So, in a sense, romantic suspense does turn out to be a woman's game - but one Robinson plays very well indeed. Sebastian Becker, the former Pinkerton detective first met in Stephen Gallagner's 19th-century occult thriller "The Kingdom of Bones," returns in THE BEDLAM DETECTIVE (Crown, $25) as a special investigator for a British group called the Masters of Lunacy, whose macabre brief is to determine whether gentlemen of substance are mentally fit to handle their estates. Becker's employers are "lawyers and parasites with no other interest than to get control of a man's fortune," according to Sir Owain Lancaster, who wrote a book blaming primordial beasts for annihilating every living soul on an expedition he led into the Amazon. Sir Owain has a dilemma: stand by his book and be branded a lunatic or repudiate his claim and be censured as a fraud. Becker is also in pursuit of another beast, the one who raped and murdered two little girls, and he's convinced Sir Owain is that fiend. Gallagher's detective is a man of fine character and strong principles, but he's upstaged by the monsters he pursues. Watching Becker track down a pedophile is gratifying, but it can't beat the sight of 20 overburdened boats hurtling through white-water rapids or Sir Owain, armed to the teeth and blasting away at giant serpents only he can see. The scariest person in Elizabeth Hand's thriller AVAILABLE DARK (Thomas Dunne/Minotaur, $23,99) is its heroine, Cassandra Neary, a post-punk photographer who flamed out after a brief career on the Lower East Side in the down-and-dirty 1970s. These days, Cass is fueled by alcohol, speed, black metal and self-loathing. But she's still a cult figure, famous for her book of photographs, "Dead Girls," and respected for her discerning eye for transgressive art - a talent that lands her a job in Helsinki, authenticating grotesque photographs inspired by Icelandic legends for a client who collects "murderabilia." Hand could never get away with this stuff if she weren't such a strong writer. Her studies of artists and musicians are something fierce, and there's a deadly beauty to her bleak rendering of the Nordic landscape. Josh Bazell is so cute when he's angry. And he's really, really angry in WILD THING (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $25.99), the insanely funny sequel to "Beat the Reaper." The protagonist of that novel, a former hit man with a medical degree and a fake name provided by the federal witness protection program (just call him Ishmael), returns here under another pseudonym, still practicing medicine while hiding out from the mob. As junior physician on a Caribbean cruise ship, Dr. Pietro Brnwa (to call him by the name that might even be his real one) has plenty of nasty things to say about the seagoing tourist industry. But his anger really kicks in when he joins an expedition to hunt a prehistoric monster in a Minnesota lake and meets a paleontologist named Violet who explains the environmental reasons we may be "eating human flesh in the streets" in less than 30 years. Once Bazell pounces on a political topic, his wrath spills over into furious footnotes, not to mention 45 pages of source notes and an appendix that read like the work of a crackpot genius. A former resident of an 18th-century mansion was hanged for poisoning her husband.