Mysteries

A Venom Beneath the Skin is the third Chacón thriller, and it briefly brings back aging, weary FBI Agent Chip Pierce. He is smitten with the 30-year-old Chacón, who is as knockout gorgeous as she is super-competent. Pierce, however, is soon killed while investigating an explosion at a crack house. The autopsy shows he was rendered semi-conscious by Guatemalan frog venom and then beaten to death with his own prosthetic leg. The prime suspect is drug lord Tekún Umán, who is also nuts about Chacón -- each saved the other's life on an earlier occasion -- and he may have become murderously jealous. Tekún is one sexy hunk, who listens to Glenn Gould and reads García Márquez. In a less civilized frame of mind, he once emasculated -- not figuratively -- an FBI narc.

Shaky in the plausibility department -- it's unclear why the FBI assigned the far from objective Chacón to this case -- the story is still fun to follow as it lurches from L.A. to Tijuana to San Francisco. Villatoro is plainly as gaga over the gutsy, winsome Chacón as several men in the story are. Let's hope there are real FBI agents as brilliant as she is, if more careful with their emotional attachments.

Robbing for Relics

Also short on believability is Kathy Reichs's Cross Bones (Scribner, $25.95), which seems to be trying to cash in on the Da Vinci Code sweepstakes. It has to do with smuggled antiquities in Montreal and grave-robbing in the Holy Land. The Holy Family shows up too -- or at least their remaining bits and pieces do. The next step in U.S. publishing surely will be for a thriller writer to clone them all and arrange for a sit-down with Larry King. ("Mary, what's the real low-down on the Annunciation?")

Reichs's hyperactive ( Bare Bones , Grave Secrets et al.) forensic archaeologist, Temperance Brennan, joins up with Montreal police dick Andrew Ryan, her sometime squeeze, to investigate the stabbing death of an importer of religious paraphernalia. A stolen skeleton surfaces -- but then vanishes again -- and its origins are traced to Masada, site of the Jewish martyrdom at Roman hands. If the skeleton is who Brennan thinks it might be, Christian belief could go up in a puff of smoke. Diabolical Muslims may be behind it all.

Forensic anthropologist Reichs's research is great in quantity. But though often interesting, the historical data are frequently undermined by characterizations that are -- let's be attentive to the setting -- unleavened , and by unintentionally hilarious repartee between Brennan and Ryan. When Brennan goes to Tel Aviv and produces some mitochondrial-DNA reports that "could be bigger than either of us imagined," altering world history, Ryan yelps, "Lay it on me." Brennan thinks Ryan is hot stuff, but there must be something about him we're not being told.

Tea and Critiques

Peter Lovesey's The Circle (SOHO, $24) is just as implausible, but it doesn't matter because he's just kidding. And a delightful kidder Lovesey is in this, his 29th jaunty jape of a mystery.

Lovesey's cigar-chomping Inspector Henrietta Mallin turns up midway in the proceedings, but the cast of mostly harmless and sometimes shrewd English eccentrics provides much of the fun. Most are members of the Chichester Writers' Circle who get together to critique one another's fantasy novels, gardening books, romances, family histories and "erotic poetry." Van driver Bob Naylor is an easygoing widower and sensitive step-dad who can produce bawdy verses for any occasion. He's insecure about his lowbrow tastes and shyly joins the writers' group just as its popular chairman, Maurice McDade, is charged with the murder of a vanity press publisher who tried to con at least one of their group. They resolve to find the killer and free McDade.

This is all lighter than air and often wonderfully funny. Lovesey's parodies of the writers' work feel accurate, but they aren't mean. He likes these groups and their ardent plodders. We cheer for the lonely Naylor and a 45-ish Circle member to get together. When they first meet, he sees that she is "pretty in a way that younger women can't be, with creases that promised to be laughter lines asking to be exercised."

Each chapter starts with an amusing epigraph, often on writers and writing. One of the best -- most mordant, anyway -- is Ralph Richardson's remark when asked to appear on a charity program in support of imprisoned writers. "No," said the actor, "on the whole I think all writers should be in prison." ·

Richard Lipez writes detective novels under the name Richard Stevenson.