Wishing for a Ray of Light in Gloomy Tales of Scum, Corruption

I have this fantasy. The next time mystery writers gather for their annual Bouchercon awards dinner, I’m going to slip some Prozac into their punch. Perhaps it will help them lighten up and stop the trend of bleak books. Granted, there’s a thin line between noir and downright dismal, but when I pick up a mystery, which is an escapist genre, I don’t want to read about tortured souls who suffer relentlessly with slim hope of redemption.

Take Richard North Patterson’s aptly named “Dark Lady” (Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95, 371 pages). Dedicated to George Bush--the senior one, according to the author’s publicist--the novel is fast-paced and ingeniously structured. But it’s a disheartening read. The novel is set in Steelton (a thinly veiled Cleveland), a city on the formerly flammable “sludge-gray Onodaga River,” which is struggling to revive itself by building a new baseball stadium. Assistant county prosecutor Stella Marz, a descendant of Polish immigrants, wants to be the “first woman elected prosecutor of Erie County” (not an ambition to really engage a reader), but her political dreams are threatened when her mentor asks her to oversee the investigations of two brutal, kinky murders. The first victim, Tommy Fielding, was the project supervisor for Steelton 2000, the new ballpark. The second, Jack Novak, was the local mob’s lawyer of choice and Stella’s first lover.

Her investigation unearths layer upon layer of corruption and allows the reader to keep company with a pantheon of not particularly memorable scum: shifty cops, crooked lawyers, dishonorable public servants and heroin-addicted prostitutes. I would have welcomed more behind-the-scenes information about stadium construction and a more likable heroine than the suspicious, hard-nosed Stella--a woman whose only friend seems to be her cat. It’s riveting in its sheer ickiness, but you’ll be bereft of serotonin by the time you’re through.

*

Slightly higher on the mood scale is three-time Edgar, four-time Gold Dagger and Grand Master Award-winner Ruth Rendell’s “Harm Done” (Crown Publishers, $24, 352 pages). Rendell may favor the darker side of life, but she is a virtuoso at composition. Leisurely, almost tortuously, she lays down plot elements: a missing girl here, a murdered executive there, a battered women’s shelter, a virtual baby. . . . And then she defies the reader and her hero, the downright lovable Chief Inspector Wexford of the Kingsmarkham Police, to unravel the connection.

Her prose is tantalizing. “On the day Lizzie came back from the dead, the police and her family and neighbors had already begun the search for her body,” the novel begins. Wexford is intrigued by the mentally slow, socially immature Lizzie, who upon her safe return refuses to divulge details about her previous whereabouts. Colleagues urge him to drop it, but then Rachel, a good-looking University of Essex student, goes missing. She too returns unharmed and, when interrogated, spins a fantastic tale about being kidnapped, drugged and forced to cook, iron and mend clothes.

Wexford should have had his hands full, what with two kidnappings, a convicted child molester about to be released from jail and patching up his difficult relationship with his daughter, Sylvia. But Rendell spins the narrative like a dreidel, and a wealthy businessman’s 3-year-old daughter disappears. Such is the author’s skill that these strange and appalling happenings unfold almost organically.

*

Still, I yearn for the good old days when the most hideous abuse did not evoke a been-there, done-that response.

It was a joy to turn to Tony Hillerman’s sharp and sweet “Hunting Badger” (Harper Collins, $26, 275 pages) starring retired Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Sgt. Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police. Chee, fresh from an Alaskan fishing vacation, returns to Shiprock, N.M., having finally gotten over his toxic relationship with the glamorous Janet Pete. Meanwhile, his old boss Leaphorn has learned to enjoy his so-called leisure time (not that the legendary detective has stopped working since he retired) with the help of Louisa, a sympathetic and insightful anthropology professor. But when a holdup at a Ute casino kills a policeman, wounds another and sends the culprits into hiding in the canyons of the reservation, Leaphorn and Chee surreptitiously set out to catch the perps before the FBI can bungle it--again!

Much of the book is informed by a similar offense that took place in 1998. Back then, the FBI launched a futile manhunt that involved more than 500 officers from 20 agencies and wreaked havoc in the Utah-Arizona wilderness. The fugitives were never caught. “Hunting Badger” will mean more to readers who are familiar with that incident; still, Hillerman’s savory olla-podrida of supernatural Indian legends, glorious desert landscapes of “dunes stabilized by growths of Mormon tea, stunted junipers, needle grass,” savvy detective work, and budding romance is irresistible. Buy 10 copies and give them out for Christmas.

*

The Times reviews mysteries every other week. Next week: Rochelle O’Gorman on audio books.