The night searchers

A TORNADO TORE through the town of Jericho, Miss., in the most recent of Ace Atkins's deeply rooted regional novels set in a gritty pocket of the rural South. In THE FORSAKEN (Putnam, $26.95), a resident who survived that last book reflects on "the ugliness of what we've done to this place, all the logging, busted-up trailers, and stripping of anything that can make a buck" and decides that "we didn't need a tornado to rip this town apart, we just needed a few more good years." Quinn Colson, the county sheriff in this true-to-life series, serves as the moral counterweight to the corrupt politicians, unethical lawmen and well-connected criminals who constitute the local power structure. Quinn gets mixed signals from this quarter when he reopens a decades-old case on the word of a survivor who now claims her attacker is still at large, and that the black vagrant the townsfolk lynched for raping her and murdering her friend was an innocent victim of vigilante rage. That's a workable narrative thread, but it gets tangled in all the other shady dealings going on in this book. Johnny Stagg, who runs a thriving drug and prostitution racket from a truck stop off Highway 45, is expanding his operation by going into partnership with a Memphis crime boss. The notorious Chains LeDoux (hairy, heavily tattooed and "animalwild," according to one old boy) is getting out of the federal penitentiary after 20 years, which brings his biker gang, the Born Losers, roaring back to Jericho. And with all the reconstruction projects underway (cross your fingers, the town might be getting a Walmart), someone has to keep track of the kickbacks. A more focused plot would have been nice, but Atkins doesn't construct a cohesive narrative so much as chase down articulate characters who can contribute to his densely layered stack of stories. Johnny Stagg has a wonderfully filthy mouth, but Atkins finds his natural-born storytellers everywhere, from Mr. Jim's barbershop to a pancake breakfast at the V.F.W. Even a brute like Chester ("Call me Animal"), who rides with the Born Losers, has a certain way with the few words in his limited vocabulary. It's all music to these ears. SHARON McCONE, the private investigator in Marcia Muller's detective stories, solved her first case in 1977, so Muller is entitled to go crazy on an assignment that takes this sturdy series to the 30-book mark. She does something more daring by giving the NIGHT SEARCHERS (Grand Central, $26) the clean, classic moves of her earliest novels. It's refreshing to watch her revered sleuth personally handle the low-tech job of following a rich young couple around town. McCone is investigating the wife's sightings of a cult of devil-worshipers supposedly offering human sacrifices in the nicer sections of San Francisco. McCone was never a loner. She started out working for a co-op of legal aid lawyers, and she maintains a full staff of operatives at her own shop. But this time, she's not as involved with her husband's hush-hush overseas business, and her demanding extended family seems to be managing its domestic problems without her. McCone uses that freedom to infiltrate a vaguely sinister group of treasure hunters who prowl the city by night, searching for clues in places like Alamo Square and Aquatic Park and the Maritime Museum down by the bay. It's the perfect narrative structure for Muller, who is never better than when she's roaming the streets of the city she knows and loves so well. EMILY ARSENAULT'S mysteries are so much fun you hardly notice they're essentially academic novels. Theresa Battle, the neurotic narrator of WHAT STRANGE CREATURES (Morrow, paper, $14.99), has been a Ph.D. candidate for so long that the new department chairwoman issues a deadline for her dissertation on Margery Kempe. Theresa is the first to admit that this medieval mystic "was absolutely an eccentric and almost certainly a nut job," but the bond between scholar and subject is one of the joys of this quirky book. Another is Theresa's affectionate relationship with her sweet but peculiar brother, Jeff, who talks her into boarding his girlfriend Kim's dog while she's out of town. Things get more complicated (and less believable) when Kim goes missing and Jeff is charged with her murder. But the salient point is that Kim's dog gets along beautifully with Theresa's three cats and her dog, Boober (named after the theologian Martin Buber), and that Theresa finds a boyfriend who shares her fascination with Margery Kempe. FRANCES FYFIELD is a criminal lawyer who writes stylish, if staid, legal mysteries. But when she wants to go over to the dark side, she produces imaginative psychological suspense novels like GOLD DIGGER (Witness/HarperCollins, paper, $13.99). The scene is a mansion by the sea where the elderly Thomas Porteous lies dying in the arms of his much younger wife, Diana. Through the magic of flashback, we learn that Thomas met his bride when she broke into his house, and we can observe the subtle ways Fyfield develops the characters of this endearing couple. But once Thomas is dead and gone, Fyfield turns like a snake on his daughters - let's call them Goneril and Regan - who try to cheat Diana out of her inheritance. Not in this fairy tale, you witches.

At the start of MWA Grand Master Muller's absorbing 32nd Sharon McCone mystery (after 2012's Looking for Yesterday), Jay and Camilla Givens, an attractive young couple who live in San Francisco's upscale Russian Hill neighborhood, come to the PI with a disturbing story. Camilla claims that one evening, while walking past a vacant lot, she saw people in hoods about to sacrifice an infant on "an outdoor fireplace, probably bought from Williams-Sonoma." Jay is skeptical of his wife's tale, as is McCone, who pegs Camilla as "an emotional defective." But she agrees to look into the matter, and soon discovers that Jay has ties to a shadowy treasure-hunting cult called the Night Searchers. Accompanied by her handsome nephew, computer whiz Mick Savage, McCone covertly joins the group for a harrowing night on the town. McCone's daring and smarts make her an irresistible heroine. The brisk narrative vividly evokes contemporary San Francisco. Agent: Molly Friedrich, Friedrich Literary. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.