The lost girls

WE FIRST MET Maureen Coughlin when Bill Loehfelm's woman-of-steel protagonist was a cocktail waitress in Staten Island, and we got to know her better after she moved to New Orleans and became a police officer. Maureen is still on the right side of the law, if only barely, in LET THE DEVIL OUT (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26), which finds this volatile cop on her worst behavior, using her month of disciplinary probation to beat down men who stalk and attack women leaving bars alone at night. It's the kind of after-hours vigilante work that's gotten Maureen in trouble in the past. But "she was tougher now. Meaner. And she hoped she was smarter." Well, maybe. But physical violence has become her raison d'être; in fact, the only time she feels safe is "when she was running and when she was chasing. And when she was hurting someone else." Maureen has mastered the rationale of "using pain to justify pain," casting herself as the champion of battered women who don't call the police because they've been conditioned to think they've brought all this on themselves. Once she's back on the job, her official assignments include finding a female serial killer whose weapon of choice is a straight razor and keeping tabs on an extremist militia called the Sovereign Citizens. But Maureen is so weighed down by her own addictions (to cigarettes, booze, pills and violence) she's punishing herself as much as the creeps she clobbers into insensibility with her trusty blackjack. Despite all the physical punishment Loehfelm's rogue cop dishes out, there's an air of cozy familiarity about this series. Here Maureen's mentor, Sgt. Preacher Boyd, makes a welcome return visit, but villains like the local power broker Solomon Heath also rear their heads, as do their sociopathic offspring. That's the thing about New Orleans: No one can bear to leave for higher, safer ground, not the evil men who prey on the city's innocents or the decent folks who try to save them, and certainly not Maureen. "She and New Orleans, they were made for each other." Everything about the place captivates her, from the vibrant jazz scene ("Where was this music when she was growing up?") to the comforts of the Irish Garden, Ms. Mae's and all the other great bars she frequents over the course of this entertaining if highly unorthodox police procedural. AND NOW TO slip into something cool by Joseph Finder - not one of his slick thrillers about coldblooded masters of finance but one of his grittier series novels featuring Nick Heller, who walks and talks and uses his fists like a private eye but prefers to be called "a private intelligence operative." In GUILTY MINDS (Dutton, $28), Heller is entrusted with a sensitive case involving a Supreme Court justice. In fact, it's Jeremiah Claflin, the chief justice himself, who's about to be smeared by Slander Sheet, a sordid gossip website claiming that a Las Vegas casino magnate, the grateful recipient of a recent favorable court judgment, has been picking up Claflin's tab for the services of an upmarket escort service. The scandal deepens when the call girl in question winds up dead. Although the content of this thriller is a bit sleazier than that of Finder's tales of corporate shenanigans, his understated style is no less smooth and polished - and classy enough for troubled characters to pause and make a big deal about the relative merits of rye whiskeys like Old Overholt and WhistlePig. TO SOME READERS, a mystery can only involve a genuine puzzle - a complicated plot with specious clues and untrustworthy characters. And for these readers, there is FALL FROM GRACE (Viking, $26). Tim Weaver's shapely narrative is set in the vastness of Dartmoor, the desolate landscape in the southwest of England where a retiree named Leonard Franks, once a high-ranking police detective, went out to the woodshed in his slippers and never came back. His daughter, herself an officer with the Met, hires David Raker, who makes his living finding missing persons, to pick up this cold case. It's a tricky business, all right, especially when the investigation intersects with the tragic story of a woman recently released from a mental hospital and mourning her dead child. Although overly wordy, Raker's first-person account plays fair with the grim facts, while maintaining a level of dread that properly suits the moody setting. PITY ALL THOSE girls, so popular of late in genre novels, who wander off and go missing, only to reappear years later as a pile of bones. Heather Young's debut novel, THE LOST GIRLS (Morrow/ HarperCollins, $25.99), belongs in their weepy company, but the delicacy of her writing elevates the drama and gives her two central characters depth and backbone. The narrative is shared by Lucy, recently deceased but living on in her diary, and her grandniece Justine, who inherits Lucy's decrepit cabin on a lake in Minnesota. Both women have rich stories to tell, but Lucy's draws on her haunting memory of "one of life's sweetest but most fleeting times - the last days before childhood gives way to adulthood." For all the beauty of Young's writing, her novel is a dark one, full of pain and loss. And the murder mystery that drives it is as shocking as anything you're likely to read for a good long while.

Does one choose a particular life out of necessity, desire, or fear? In her debut novel, Young tells the story of Lucy, 11, and her family as they spend the summer of 1935 at their lake house in a remote part of Minnesota the last summer anyone will see Lucy's youngest sister alive. Lucy is shocked to find her previously predictable existence monumentally shifting beneath her feet. Now on her deathbed, Lucy, overwhelmed with the secrets about that summer she has kept all these years, writes down the full, true story of those fateful months and leaves it for her great-niece, Justine. Lucy also bequeaths Justine the lake house. When Justine learns of her inheritance, she jumps at the opportunity to leave a bad relationship and moves from San Diego to Minnesota with her two young daughters in the middle of winter. However, as Lucy realized toward the end of her life and Justine will learn shortly, not confronting the truth to avoid pain is just another form of suffering. Suspenseful and finely wrought, Young's tale is not easily forgotten.--Spanner, Alison D. Copyright 2016 Booklist