Whispers of the dead

That keening voice you hear in THE SCARECROW (Little, Brown, $27.99) belongs to a Michael Connelly you may not know - not the best-selling author riding high on his 20th novel, but the newspaper guy who started out covering the crime beat for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and went on to become a top crime reporter for The Los Angeles Times. That voice was a lot cockier in "The Poet," the 1996 thriller in which Connelly introduced Jack McEvoy, a hotshot Denver newsman who parlays a much too personal encounter with a poetry-spouting serial killer into a best-selling book and a ride out of town to a bigger paper. Here, the voice is considerably more subdued and more than a little desperate, as Jack, who has just been pink-slipped at The Los Angeles Times, latches on to another psycho as his professional meal ticket, envisioning one last great story before The Times, if not the entire newspaper industry, goes down in flames./ Connelly, who has the nerve and timing of a whole SWAT team, gives Jack two weeks to find the creep who's been raping and killing attractive long-legged women and dumping their remains in car trunks - if his young replacement doesn't beat him to the story. But this ambitious upstart is too lovely and leggy for her own good, and the smart money's on Jack. To make the story sexier, Jack picks up a partner - Rachel Walling, the supersmart F.B.I. agent who jeopardized her career for him in "The Poet." These two follow the Internet trail of identity theft, pornography Web sites, electronic surveillance and industrial sabotage right to its source, a vast data processing and storage operation known as "the farm" and protected by a certain mastermind known as the Scarecrow./ But the damage done by this electronically savvy killer is nothing compared with the slaughter of the nation's newspapers, which Connelly compresses into the grim fight for life going on at The Los Angeles Times. Once "the best place in the world to work" but now "an intellectual ghost town," its ominously quiet newsroom is the harbinger of a time when there will be no eyes left to watch the nation or voices to sound an alarm. "In many ways," Jack says in his chilling requiem for the industry, "I was relieved that I would not be around to see it."/ Nancy Drew drives her own blue roadster. Harriet the Spy travels in a chauffeured limousine. Emma Graham, Martha Grimes's 12-year-old sleuth, takes taxis and trains. Flavia de Luce, the 11-year-old heroine of Alan Bradley's first mystery, THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE (Delacorte, $23), goes her way on a beat-up bicycle she calls Gladys, more independent and demonstrably naughtier than her literary sister-sleuths./ The neglected youngest daughter of a widower who never looks up from his precious stamp collection, Flavia takes refuge from her loneliness in the magnificent Victorian chemistry laboratory an ancestor installed at the family's estate in the English countryside. With "An Elementary Study of Chemistry" as her bible, the precocious child has become an expert in poisons - a nasty skill that gets her in trouble when she melts down a sister's pearls, but serves her well when a stranger turns up dead in the cucumber patch and her father is arrested for murder. Impressive as a sleuth and enchanting as a mad scientist ("What a jolly poison could be extracted from the jonquil"), Flavia is most endearing as a little girl who has learned how to amuse herself in a big lonely house./ If WHISPERS OF THE DEAD (Delacorte, $26) sends readers to Simon Beckett's fine previous mysteries, "The Chemistry of Death" and "Written in Bone," then justice will have been served. Maybe it's only a matter of crossed cultural wires, but David Hunter, the author's engaging British sleuth, fails to thrive when he pays a visit to the Forensic Anthropology Center ("the Body Farm") in Knoxville, Tenn., where he trained early in his career. While there, he's roped into looking for a creative serial killer who leaves the corpses of his tortured victims in incongruous settings./ Beckett handles the gruesome morgue chores with scrupulous scientific rigor, and his entomological knowledge of the feeding and breeding habits of maggots is awesome. But his crudely drawn American characters, so un-Southern in their rudeness, treat the eminent Dr. Hunter like dirt and seem to view his native Britain as some poky developing nation. "I'm sure you're well enough respected back home," one of them says, "but this is Tennessee." Well, not really./ Jack Liffey, the private investigator in John Shannon's mysteries, works the roughest territory in the genre - the subculture of the Southern California teenager. "I'm not really a detective," the big-hearted P.I. explains in PALOS VERDES BLUE (Pegasus, $25). "My practice is limited to looking for missing children." That doesn't begin to describe the harrowing rescue job he undertakes when he begins searching for a schoolgirl with a passionate commitment to protecting butterflies and other endangered species, including the illegal Mexican workers camping out on the cliffs above Lunada Bay. Unaware that his own impetuous teenage daughter is endangering herself by trying to help him, Liffey patiently excavates the area's social strata, uncovering layers of antagonism among the privileged rich and their anonymous day laborers, rival surfer gangs and a racist militia group prowling the hills - hostility that bounces right back at parents from their alienated children./ Michael Connelly's thriller features a savvy killer - and the slaughter of the newspaper industry./

Beckett's third thriller to feature Dr. David Hunter, who was almost stabbed to death in 2007's Written in Bone, takes Hunter from his familiar British surroundings to Tennessee's legendary Body Farm, where researchers study how corpses decompose. When evidence surfaces that a serial killer is at large, Hunter's mentor and Body Farm director, Tom Lieberman, enlists his help in tracking down the culprit. After the killer abducts profiler Alex Irving, fears escalate that future victims will include other members of the investigating team. Still traumatized by his brush with death and unsure of the validity of his instincts, Hunter takes a while to hit his stride. As in Written in Bone, Beckett ratchets up the suspense by inserting short sections from the murderer's perspective, and keeps the tension taut to the end with a late twist. While the final revelation won't surprise everyone, this entry reinforces the author's place in the front rank of forensic crime novelists. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Chapter One Skin. The largest human organ, it is also the most overlooked. Accounting for an eighth of the entire body mass, on an average adult it covers an area of approximately two square metres. Structurally skin is a work of art, a nest of capillaries, glands and nerves that both regulates and protects. It is our sensory interface with the outside world, the barrier at which our individuality--our self--ends. And even in death, something of that individuality remains. When the body dies, the enzymes that life has held in check run amok. They devour cell walls, causing the liquid contents to escape. The fluid rises to the surface, gathering below the dermal layers and causing them to loosen. Skin and body, until now two integral parts of the whole, begin to separate. Blisters form. Whole swathes begin to slip, sloughing off the body like an unwanted coat on a summer's day. But, even dead and discarded, skin retains traces of its former self. Even now it can still have a story to tell, and secrets to keep. Provided you know how to look. *  *  * Earl Bateman lay on his back, face turned to the sun. Overhead, birds wheeled in the blue Tennessee sky, cloudless but for the slowly dispersing vapour trail of a jet. Earl had always enjoyed the sun. Enjoyed the sting of it on his skin after a long day's fishing, enjoyed the way its brightness lent a new look to whatever it touched. There was no shortage of sun in Tennessee, but Earl came originally from Chicago, and the cold winters there had left a permanent chill in his bones. When he'd moved to Memphis back in the seventies, he'd found the swampy humidity far more to his liking than the windy streets of his home city. Of course, as a dentist in a small practice, with a young wife and two small children to keep, he didn't spend as much time out in it as he might have liked. But it was there, all the same. He even liked the sweltering heat of Tennessean summers, when the breeze would feel like a hot flannel, and the evenings were spent in the airless swelter of the cramped apartment he and Kate shared with the boys. Things had changed, since then. The dental practice had flourished, and the apartment had long since given way to bigger and better things. Two years before, he and Kate had moved into a new five-bedroomed house in a good neighbourhood, with a wide, rich green lawn where the growing brood of grandchildren could safely play, and the early morning sunshine would shatter into miniature rainbows in the fine spray from the water-sprinkler. It had been on the lawn, sweating and cursing as he'd struggled to saw off a dead branch from the big old laburnum, that he'd had the heart attack. He'd left the saw still trapped in the tree limb and managed to take a few faltering steps towards the house before the pain had felled him. In the ambulance, with an oxygen mask strapped over his face, he had held tightly on to Kate's hand and tried to smile to reassure her. At the hospital there had been the usual urgent ballet of medical staff, the frantic unsheathing of needles and beeping of machines. It had been a relief when they'd eventually fallen silent. A short time later, after the necessary forms had been signed, the inevitable bureaucracy that accompanies each of us from birth, Earl had been released. Now he was stretched out in the spring sun. He was naked, lying on a low wooden frame that was raised off the carpet of meadow grass and leaves. He'd been here for over a week, long enough for the flesh to have melted away, exposing bone and cartilage under the mummified skin. Wisps of hair still clung to the back of his skull, from which empty eye sockets gazed at the cerulean blue sky. I finished taking measurements and stepped out of the wire mesh cage that protected the dentist's body from birds and rodents. I wiped the sweat from my forehead. It was late Excerpted from Whispers of the Dead by Simon Beckett All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.