Mysteries

In Bone Valley, Matturro's larky defense attorney Lilly Cleary is working for pain-in-the-neck environmentalist Angus John Cartright, who's being sued by growers for "libeling" oranges. Despite the First Amendment, speaking ill of an orange is verboten in the Sunshine State. Not coincidentally, as it happens, an old boyfriend of Cleary's -- one of a lengthy queue -- is found dead in a phosphogypsum "stack." That's a lake of toxic waste behind a 70-foot wall. The locals call this one Boogie Bog.

Matturro's plot lurches around more or less plausibly, but the main attractions here are the hair-raising details of a mining industry the author believes to be dangerously under-regulated, and Cleary's cheerful, distinctly American narrative voice.

Cleary's chums are a Preston Sturges-like bunch of small-town goofballs, and she's as appealingly funny as the rest of them. She's dating a fellow lawyer but does not fail to take note of other men. When a knockout who "looks like a Mexican Jesus fixing to feed the poor ones" walks into her office, Cleary can suddenly "smell [her] own pheremones." On his way out, cool Miguel utters, "We'll be in touch," and "the word touch hung in the air until I saw little flames around it."

Sometimes Matturro's sassy, sunny tone is at odds with the environmental horrors she deplores. But, like Hiassen, she keeps you with her all the way, laughing or gulping.

Requiem for a Dealer

By Jo Bannister | St. Martin's Minotaur. 268 pp. | $23.95

Everybody knows somebody who's "a mug for a hard-luck story." Some people just have that knack for entanglements with those who "have no friends and no luck -- they're bad news. They are the authors of their own misfortune." That's the problem for young math teacher Daniel Hood in Requiem for a Dealer, the sixth Brodie Farrell mystery by Jo Bannister. In rural England, where he lives, a young woman bounces off the fender of Hood's car in the dark. Then he swallows her wild story about a hauler of race horses trying to kill her to shut her up about the ugly facts surrounding her stable-owner father's odd death, which may or may not have been a suicide.

But it turns out that the seemingly feckless Hood sniffs out some chicanery involving drug-running from the continent to the English Midlands. And it's his friend Farrell, a private eye, who's the boob here -- and not for the first time. She nearly got Hood killed in some earlier misadventure, and he barely survives her blithering this time.

Bannister's is one of the quirkier series to come out of a part of the world where quirkiness is a kind of regional religion. Not everyone here is a "bunny-boiler" -- Farrell's attention-getting description of Hood's unsteady young woman friend -- but they're all a little weird. Weird, though, in such a nice English way, with lines like: "Brodie was right, there was a thread running through these events which might be considered to connect them -- but where it wasn't lumberingly predictable it was diaphanously tenuous." Diaphanously tenuous! This is mystery writing a long way from Florida, Shanghai or even Zurich. ·

Richard Lipez writes the Don Strachey private eye novels under the name Richard Stevenson. Two of them, "Ice Blues" and "Third Man Out," have just been reissued.