Mysteries

With its byzantine politics and delectable cuisine, Italy produces crime con brio.

Thrills by the Kilo

All the CIA personnel are misguided, and the FBI is staffed by dolts in Ghost Dancer (Ballantine, $25.95), which John Case has ripped from tomorrow's headlines -- or so the excited author would have us believe. Luckily for humanity -- and the U.S. Treasury -- clever, nice-guy war photographer Mike Burke is around to save civilization from a sometimes mordantly funny electronic Armageddon in this essentially silly but still entertaining ticking-bomb thriller.

The bad egg here is Jack Wilson, an American Indian ex-con who is out to wreak belated revenge for the massacre at Wounded Knee. A mathematical genius, Wilson hooks up with al-Qaeda to build a superweapon based on Croatian-born scientist Nikola Tesla's century-old particle beam ideas.

It's the opposite of a neutron bomb, which "would kill living things and leave the infrastructure viable. [Tesla's] pulse would destroy the infrastructure without directly impacting anything that lived and breathed." Wilson's test zap at Culpeper, Va. -- a planned bigger blast could devastate the entire United States -- knocks out power, fries computers and car engines, and sends an airliner en route to Dulles fluttering earthward.

Like most thriller writers who sell books by the kilo, Case relies heavily on padding. Financing for Wilson's plot to "stop the motor of the world" goes awry when the Saudis lock up an especially rotten prince, and the al-Qaeda operatives with whom Wilson is in league must resort to dealing in arms, drugs and diamonds to raise cash. Case's tour of some of the worst places and most ghastly people on Earth, from Central Asia to Congo, is a diversion, but a knowing and memorable one. We meet characters such as Jair da Rosa, a self-described "organizer of outcomes." Da Rosa has useful connections to a man called Big Ping, who has 50,000 gangsters at his disposal, "working as a team. Like Wal-Mart, but with guns."

Human Traffic

Brutal men and women who operate on a large scale also turn up in Rounding the Mark (Penguin; paperback, $13; translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli), Andrea Camilleri's new police procedural featuring cranky, principled, always pleasing-to-run-into Sicilian Inspector Salvo Montalbano. A gang that traffics in human lives is responsible for the partially decomposed corpse Montalbano bumps into when he goes for a swim in the sea one day. Up to that moment, he had been fed up and bent on resigning from the force: Politically motivated police savagery toward peaceful demonstrators at a G-8 summit in Genoa struck him as a personal betrayal.

Montalbano's work is at the center of his Sicilian life -- his wife, Livia, is kept up north by her own job -- but he is careful to take time out for pleasures such as sleep, food and sex. The first paragraph of the book has loving references to both octopus a strascinasali and sardines a beccafico . And while his heart belongs to Livia, from time to time Montalbano lies down with an unhappily married Swede named Ingrid.

Camilleri is droll about adultery Latin style. Ingrid tells Montalbano of another affair she had, "with a member of parliament, a strict Catholic . . . who before getting into bed with her would kneel on the floor and beg God's forgiveness for the sin he was about to commit." She helps him spy on a remote house where Moroccan dealers in stolen children operate. In an author's note, Camilleri reports that thousands of Asian, African and Eastern European children who have been kidnapped or sold by their parents traverse Italy every year. They become slaves to pedophiles, or they are maimed and turned into pathetic beggars, or they may be killed for their organs. Finally, Montalbano stays on as a policeman. We can see why he must do so, despite the political rot that so often makes him want to walk away.

Some Suspects Are Ruled Out

The Italy of an earlier era is the setting for Carlo Lucarelli's nifty short thriller Carte Blanche (Europa; paperback, $14.95; translated from the Italian by Michael Reynolds). It is 1945, and Commissario De Luca must investigate the fatal stabbing of a well-connected young fascist known for sleeping with some of Milan's most alluring women. Several of them visited the fellow's apartment on the day he was castrated and stabbed in the heart.

Benito Mussolini's regime is disintegrating as the allies move northward, so politics intrude on De Luca's sleuthing. If the killer turns out to be German, might De Luca arrest him? "A German, no. But that is obvious," a supervisor tells him. The suspects are a flavorsome lot, including a count's morphine-addicted daughter, who comes on to De Luca like one of the Sternwood sisters in The Big Sleep .

While the police work in Carte Blanche is smart and suspenseful, the most striking feature is Lucarelli's textured depiction of life in a society where power is shifting from murderous oppressors to the seething oppressed. One murder suspect tells De Luca, "It makes me laugh, this idiotic rivalry with [Count] Tedesco to see who is the cleverest and most available collaborator. . . . As soon as the front falls they'll chase them down and put them all up against a wall without even asking their names." This could be any number of other societies where the tables have turned violently.

Killer Cuisine

Poppy Z. Brite's Soul Kitchen (Three Rivers; paperback, $13.95) is a good enough murder mystery, in which the wrong man is convicted for the bashing death of a wealthy New Orleans restaurateur. More interestingly, it is both fun and heartbreaking on the subject of a culinary and social culture now threatened with extinction by Hurricane Katrina. The third book in a series, it also features one of the most believable and companionable gay male couples in current genre fiction.

Chefs John Rickey and "G-Man" Stubbs have been lovers for 16 years, since they were 17. Stubbs is less ambitious, more easygoing and likes to watch basketball on TV. Rickey is more tightly wound and has back problems, probably stress-related. He develops a Vicodin addiction, which makes him dreamy, and it's a sudden source of friction between the two men.

Rickey and G-Man may have heard of "Queer Eye" and Madonna, but their R&R is to go fishing. Their glitter-free disconnect from what is generally thought of as American gay culture is refreshing.

What's most lively here is the food and restaurant talk, the lore and intrigue. While foodie mysteries tend toward the cute, Brite's portrayal feels like the real thing: the egos, the tempers, the camaraderie, the precariousness, the trends, the competition, the drugs and sometimes the criminality -- and, in pre-Katrina New Orleans, the great eats.

Sleepless in New York

Andrew Vachss's crime avenger Burke is back in Mask Market (Pantheon, $24.95), and he's still mad as hell at just about everybody: Amtrak cellphone boors, who sound like "magpies on angel dust"; the "sports-whore" mayor of New York, who wants to level a neighborhood for an unnecessary West Side stadium; and -- above all -- the pimps and sadists who exploit and abuse vulnerable young people in the more squalid precincts of New York City's commercial sex industry.

Burke goes looking for Beryl Preston, a girl he rescued from a brutal pimp 20 years earlier and returned to her wealthy father. Now she's missing again, maybe hiding out from the killers of a hedge-fund crook who used Preston as a bank. What Burke eventually learns is ugly enough, but not much uglier than just about everything else in a New York City that, seen through Burke's eyes, is loathsome. It's the anti-Woody Allen New York -- not that Vachss isn't sometimes witty, too. Burke meets an informant "in the lobby of an 'I'm cool, but are you ?' hotel on West Fifty-second. It's perfect for a man in my line of work. The people who hang out there put in so much mirror time that their observational skills have atrophied from disuse." ·

Richard Lipez writes the Don Strachey private eye novels under the name Richard Stevenson.