A death in the small hours

The story opens with a harrowing flashback to the riots of 1992, when South Central went up in flames. Bosch and his partner were sent into this war zone to work an "ordinary" homicide, the execution-style killing of a white woman quickly tagged "Snow White." Like scores of other crimes committed during those chaotic days, the murder of Anneke Jespersen, a Danish photojournalist and international war correspondent, was never solved. With the 20th anniversary of the riots coming up, the top brass try to stop Bosch from revisiting his old turf, anticipating a public-relations nightmare should the murder of a white woman turn out to be the only open case the police manage to close. Bosch won't budge, of course, because that's just the way Bosch is. Connelly has always been scrupulous about following proper procedure, which means that his aging detective must scramble to keep current in the forensic sciences. It's fun to watch an old war horse like Bosch navigating the new technology (or, more often than not, getting younger officers to do it for him). But Bosch is working a 20-year-old case using 20-year-old methods that involve analog human skills, like interrogating hostile witnesses, making blind phone calls and "walking a gun" - cop jargon for methodically linking a single gun to multiple murders. The title of the novel refers to what is probably the most primitive (and symbolically potent) example of such police work: the street cop's handwritten notes, taken in the field and jotted down on index cards to be stored in little black boxes. Handed one of these objects by an old-school cop, Bosch regards it with respectful awe, amazed it escaped the purge that imperfectly transferred all hard files to digital archives. However dated, some artifacts simply must be saved. The upper-class amateur sleuth, an endangered species even in historical mysteries, is very much alive in Charles Finch's charming Victorian whodunits. In A DEATH IN THE SMALL HOURS (Minotaur, $24.99), Charles Lenox packs up his wife and child and flees the hurly-burly of London for his uncle's country estate, where he can gather his thoughts for the keynote speech he's to deliver at a coming session of Parliament. To ward off the torpor of country life, Lenox sets out to investigate certain acts of vandalism that have alarmed Uncle Freddie, who comes from a long line of "gentle gentlemen" and feels responsible for the well-being of the village. Coming from the same ancestral line, Lenox shows a similar gentility when he exposes the vices and misdeeds of the villagers without doing damage to the basic soundness of the community. But while he isn't a social snob like the golden-age sleuths on whom he's modeled, Lenox is fast becoming a paragon of virtue that makes him seem too good to be true. Not only does this member of Parliament argue for stricter child-labor laws, expanded literacy, voting rights and the abolishment of capital punishment, but in defiance of Victorian convention he keeps sneaking into the nursery to cuddle his darling baby daughter. Timothy Hallinan's affable antihero, an accomplished thief but inept sleuth named Junior Bender, makes a terrific first impression in CRASHED (Sono Crime, $25), swinging from a chandelier to escape the jaws of four vicious guard dogs. The burglary that went so horribly wrong was the nasty work of Trey Annunziato, a Los Angeles mob boss who set Bender up in order to blackmail him into working for her. His ostensible assignment is to stop a saboteur from wrecking the multimillion-dollar porn movie Trey is bankrolling. But as he discovers and to his dismay, the real job is to chaperon the star, a beloved child actor who grew up to be a sad and wasted addict, her addled mind currently dwelling on "Planet Zero, where the sky is black and the rivers are full of dead animals." Bender's quick wit and smart mouth make him a boon companion on this oddball adventure. Whether he's earnestly analyzing the meaning of the "dead wet girl ghosts" in Japanese horror movies or simply knocking out a quick bon mot, he talks a great game. After writing several historical novels set in Toronto in the 1890s, Maureen Jennings has shifted her attention to England during the blitz. BEWARE THIS BOY (McClelland & Stewart, $22.99), the second book in this series, sends Inspector Tom Tyler to Birmingham to investigate a fatal explosion in a munitions factory. The plot loses its footing in a political swamp, but the period setting is amazingly vivid and terribly real. Writing with all senses on high alert, Jennings creates a flawless approximation of a typical day in the life of all the girls who worked on weapons assembly lines, their skin yellow and their hair orange from the cordite. And when she takes the story underground during an air raid, those bombs she starts dropping come so close that readers might want to duck their heads and take cover. Michael Connellys hero, a veteran cop, makes sneaky end-runs around the Los Angeles Police Department.

From Chapter One: Lady Jane reached the bottom of the stairs. She was a pretty woman, in rather a plain way, dark-haired and at the moment pale, wearing a gray dress with a pink ribbon at the waist. Above all the impression she left on people was of goodness--or perhaps that was the impression she left primarily on Lenox, because he knew her so well, and therefore knew that quality in her. For many long years they had been dear friends, living side by side on Hampden Lane; now, still to his great surprise, they were man and wife. They had married four years before. Better still, to add to his great happiness and evergreen surprise, at long last they had received a blessing that made him stop and smile to himself at random moments throughout every day, as he just had in his study, a blessing that never failed to lift his spirits above the intransigent tedium of politics: a daughter, Sophie. She had been theirs for three months, and every day her personality developed in new, startling, wonderful directions. Almost every hour he snuck away from his work to glimpse her, sleeping or better yet awake. Granted, she didn't do much--she was no great hand at arithmetic, as Lady Jane would joke, seldom said anything witty, would prove useless aboard a horse--but he found even her minutest motions enchanting. Babies had always seemed much of a muchness to him, but how wrong he had been! When she wriggled an inch to the left he found himself holding his breath with excitement. After Jane had gone downstairs to arrange his lunch with the butler and the cook, Lenox remained in the hall, where he opened his letter. It was from his uncle Frederick, a relation of Lenox's late mother. Dear Charles, Please consider this a formal invitation to come down for a week or two, with Jane of course and the new Lenox; I very much want to meet her. The garden is in fine shape, and then, Fripp is very anxious to have you for the cricket, which takes place Saturday week. I haven't seen you in more than a year, you know. Yours with affection, Frederick Ponsonby Postscript: To sweeten the pot, shall I mention that in town, recently, there have been a series of strange vandalisms? The police cannot make head or tail of them and so everyone is in great stir. Perhaps you might lend a hand. Lenox smiled. He was fond of his uncle, an eccentric man, retiring and very devoted to his small, ancient country house, which lay just by a village. Since the age of four or five Lenox had gone there once a year, usually for a fortnight, though it was true that the stretches between visits had gotten longer more recently, as life had grown busier. Still, there was no way he could leave London just at this moment, with so many political matters hanging in the balance. He tucked the note into his jacket pocket and turned back to his study. Copyright © 2012 by Charles Finch Excerpted from A Death in the Small Hours by Charles Finch All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.