Roundup: Mystery/thriller books out now

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Updated: July 7, 2011 3:05PM

‘BURIED PREY,’ by John Sandford (Putnam, 390 pages, $27.95)

Longtime readers of Sandford’s Lucas Davenport/Prey series will get their hearts broken in this latest tale when a major character leaves terra firma the hard way. It deeply bummed me out. I will say no more.

The story looks back at Davenport’s early years. About half the book is a flashback to the months in 1985 when Davenport rose from street cop to detective, all centered around the case of two abducted girls. The case was pinned on a local bum and put to bed, though that outcome didn’t sit right with Davenport.

The girls’ bodies are uncovered in the present day and now that Davenport heads a special state investigative branch, he is determined to pursue the real killer to undo the earlier miscarriage of justice.

As always, Davenport is a high-IQ blunt instrument, dressed to the nines, wheeling his Porsche around the Twin Cities, and he remains as self-satisfied and charming as ever, but the book’s emotional underpinnings are rooted deeply in Davenport’s guilt and anger and pain, all the result of the earlier crime and the events that unfold in the present. If this were a different series and Davenport had a history of alcohol or drug abuse, this would be the book that watched him sink into self-destructive behavior. But it isn’t that series, though his behavior does frighten his friends as they fear he’ll play out some kind of revenge fantasy.

One of the best in the long-running series.

‘THE INFORMANT,’ by Thomas Perry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 325 pages, $27)

It’s Butcher’s Boy vs. The Mafia, Round Three. To remind readers, The Butcher’s Boy, Perry’s first novel, revolved around Michael Schaeffer, a professional assassin wronged by a Mafia crime family; instead of paying up, they tried to kill him. Bad mistake. Much punishment ensued. And then he retired.

Round Two — told in Sleeping Dogs — was too much a rope-a-dope, Schaeffer going through the motions, eradicating pesky Mafia soldiers. The Informant finds Perry in finer form, though the book is almost a retelling of the second: an attempt on Schaeffer’s life in England, where he’s lived these years, sends him back to the States to discourage further such stupid actions.

Like several other fictional hit men, Schaeffer is a professional — he lacks tics or compulsions. He is the guy next door, except this guy next door owns quite a few guns and has a heart as cold as steel in winter. He is, interestingly, the moral center in Perry’s carefully crafted world.

Shadowing Schaeffer is Justice Department agent Elizabeth Waring, who also pursued him in Sleeping Dogs. Here she wants to turn Schaeffer into an informant because he possesses a trove of information about the Mafia.

It is both a pursuit and a seduction — neither romantic nor sexual — and the question that hovers over the book is Perry’s resolution.

‘A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF,’ by Lawrence Block (Little, Brown, 319 pages, $25.99)

Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder returns, although Block had previously said he was done with the series; and as with so many novels this season, it’s a book-length flashback. Perhaps one of the finest novels about alcoholism, Eight Million Ways to Die depicted Scudder’s final descent into seizures and blackouts and general on-death’s-doorstep drunkenness; it should read as a cautionary tale for anyone over the legal drinking age. This is “Eight Million Ways to Die, Part II.”

A Drop of the Hard Stuff covers the time period immediately following the earlier book. An ex-NYC cop, Scudder acts as a private eye, though he is unlicensed; he does folks favors and they express their gratitude in cash. It pays the rent on his downtown hotel. Block knows that the only soul that can be saved on this earth is your own, so while Scudder seeks the solution to the murder of an old almost-friend, the life at stake here is his own. In his first year or so of sobriety, Scudder is fragile and on some level seeking the appropriate excuse to fall off the wagon.

It is an intimate look into the darker crevices of an alcoholic struggling with himself. Some of the juice is sapped from the story because we know this is a flashback and we know that Scudder has been sober a long time. But I always sensed that it was possible he could slip off the edge at any moment, and this book dances that edge like Nureyev.

‘GRACE INTERRUPTED,’ by Julie Hyzy (Berkley, 304 pages, $7.99)

The formula that Julie Hyzy established in her White House chef series fits fine in her newer series featuring Grace Wheaton, the head administrator of Marshfield Manor, a fancy Southern estate. (Think the Biltmore in Asheville, N.C., and you get the picture.)

Grace shares the same personality as White House chef Olivia Paras: engaging, caring, vulnerable, considerate, observant, smart. She does possess a few humanizing warts, but the tone is so warm and generous that even the warts are exposed in ways that make them merely a part of the natural landscape of personality.

Grace resides in a large home she inherited from her mother. The first book in the series, Grace Under Pressure, introduced Grace and her back story: She shares the house with a gay couple who run a wine shop. A small side plot involves a so-called tuxedo kitten that shows up needing a home.

The second book involves a group of Civil War re-enactors camped on the manor grounds and a murder of one of the re-enactors, who it turns out has some nasty history with Jack Embers, the estate’s groundskeeper and the recent object of Grace’s attention.

As Olivia does in the White House books, Grace gets sucked into the investigation — becoming a thorn in the side of the local police but also stirring things up in such a way that truth slowly rises from the confusion and chaos of the re-enactors, the somewhat slow local cops, and various others who feel no reluctance in pointing fingers.

Randy Michael Signor is a Seattle-based free-lance writer.