The body in the boudoir

Joseph Olshan has stepped up and written one for the home team. CLOUDLAND (Minotaur, $24.99) is set in the bleak Upper Connecticut River Valley that forms the border of Vermont and New Hampshire, a place where spring doesn't arrive until it's summer. Catherine Winslow, whose intimate narrative voice keeps directing our eyes to the beauty of this stark landscape, is taking a walk when she comes upon the half-frozen body of a woman in a pink parka, strangled and stabbed and left beneath an apple tree to spend the past winter under a blanket of snow. Olshan handles some genre conventions clumsily. Although the victim is the sixth woman in two years found murdered in the same fashion, the police investigation is undermanned and sloppily managed. It's also implausible that both the lead detective and the consulting forensic psychiatrist, who just happens to live up the road from Catherine, would use her as a sounding board. But the shaky mechanics don't matter so much once Olshan gets down to the real business of observing the destructive impact the killings have on this isolated region. This is the kind of rural community where the transplanted urban professionals living on Cloudland Road normally get along just fine with Yankee farmers like Hiram Osmond, a secondgeneration knacker who butchers dead farm animals, renders their carcasses and sells the good parts to people who like to decorate with skulls. Now neighbor no longer looks neighbor in the eye. The characters are complicated, and none more so than Catherine, who's struggling to recover from the painful breakup of an affair with a former student that cost her a good teaching job and caused a rift with her daughter. Although Olshan is merciful to all the cruel lovers, faithless spouses and angry children who live in this lonely place, the bracing clarity of his prose doesn't allow for false sentiment. (He describes one savagely mutilated murder victim as lying "as still as a deepforest kill.") When speaking of matters like romantic obsession and violence in close relationships, a voice like that really cuts through the air of a cold climate. James Runcie, son of a former archbishop of Canterbury, has written the coziest of cozy murder mysteries. SIDNEY CHAMBERS AND THE SHADOW OF DEATH (Bloomsbury, paper, $16) is a collection of stories set in a quaint English village during the 1950s and featuring a young Anglican vicar who finds spiritual inspiration in criminal investigation. Addressing certain suspicions about the suicide of a local solicitor, Canon Sidney Chambers, the new vicar of the church of St. Andrew and St. Mary in Grantchester, is reminded that "how we love determines how we live." And investigating the theft of a valuable ring during an elegant London dinner party leads him to wonder how much a person can change over the course of a lifetime. No matter how much fun he derives from his sleuthing, Sidney tells himself that solving a tough case can teach him a moral lesson: "how to live an honorable life and protect the greater good." Taken individually, each of these clerical whodunits poses a clever puzzle for armchair detectives. Viewed as a collective study of British life as it was lived when Elizabeth II first ascended the throne, these stories present a consistently charming and occasionally cutting commentary on "a postwar landscape full of industry, promise and concrete." Psychological suspense is the genre of choice for glorifying the bond between mother and child: mother rushes into burning building, sacrifices life to save child, earns place in paradise. More than a flip paradigm, that's the actual plot of AFTERWARDS (Crown, $25), a gripping novel by Rosamund Lupton about a mother's nightmare. Grace Covey is among the proud parents on the field for sports day at the Sidley House Preparatory School when a fire breaks out inside the building. Cut to the hospital, where Grace is in a coma with brain injuries and her "appallingly hurt" 17-year-old daughter, Jenny, is in the burn unit. To add to her woes, Grace's 8-year-old son, Adam, is suspected of having set the fire. The eerie thing is, both Grace and Jenny have slipped out of their damaged bodies and become ghostly detectives, which takes considerable pluck and ingenuity. The second-person narrative voice assigned to Grace has its limitations, mainly because it's addressed to her wooden and inconsequential husband. "Be kinder to your wife," she's compelled to admonish him. "Out-of-body experiences do happen." Readers who might have drifted away from Katherine Hall Page's pleasing mysteries starring Faith Fairchild, the congenitally curious wife of a New England minister and the proprietor of a catering company wittily named "Have Faith," should accept the homecoming invitation extended in THE BODY IN THE BOUDOIR (Morrow/HarperCollins, $23.99). Although it's the 20th book in the series, the story is set in 1990, when Faith is still single, living in Manhattan and about to be swept off her feet by a young cleric she meets while catering a wedding at the Riverside Church. After their storybook courtship, Faith is making wedding plans when someone at her bridal shower tries to poison her. To be honest, the attempts on Faith's life are pallid compared with the retro fun of perusing a vintage wedding menu, shopping at Bergdorf 's bridal salon and having tea at the Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel. Shallow pleasures, perhaps. But that's just the way it is. After a string of murders in a remote valley, neighbor no longer looks neighbor in the eye.