No known grave A Detective Inspector Tom Tyler mystery

IT'S ALWAYS THE VOICE, the singular sound of a place like none other, that draws you into a regional mystery. In Tom Cooper's first novel, THE MARAUDERS (Crown, $26), that beguiling music comes out of the Louisiana bayous, where a raucous chorus of shrimp fishermen, marijuana growers, treasure hunters, professional crooks and common thieves fight to be heard. Every last one of these gaudy characters has a story to tell about life on the Gulf Coast. Gus Lindquist, who keeps misplacing his prosthetic arm when he's had too much to drink, is obsessively hunting for the pirate Jean Lafitte's buried treasure. Bobby Trench, a fisherman who mourns the days of the great shrimp hauls ("Before the oil spill. Before Katrina"), rues his decision to defy the hurricane that dragged his wife out to sea. But it's the voice of Trench's 17-year-old son, Wes, that cuts through the clamor. Proud of coming from a long line of fishermen, Wes wants nothing more than to be a shrimper - and to reach middle age without becoming "hunchbacked and bitter and brokenhearted like his father." The loose plot is composed of episodic scenes and random criminal events that are eventually marshaled into a semi-coherent narrative on the age-old theme of greed. A coldblooded BP representative snakes through the story, pressing fishermen to settle their claims for a song. A couple of inept crooks lurk around the waterways looking for the island where the psychopathic Toup twins grow their marijuana crop. And Trench keeps trying to find a deck hand to go out on the Bayou Sweetheart and work themselves to death for the pitiful hauls from the devastated fisheries. It hurts to laugh at the preposterous get-rich-quick schemes of these swamp denizens, but laugh we must, if only to find some relief from the grim realism of Cooper's portrait of life in these coastal communities after the oil companies sank their pipelines and dug up the marshes and fouled the shrimp beds with millions of gallons of crude. Better to hoot at Gus Lindquist wrestling with the alligator someone put in his bedroom than listen to the story of how he lost his arm or hear his pathetic pipe dreams as he imagines what he'll do when he finds Lafitte's treasure. THERE'S ALWAYS a creep factor in psychological suspense novels, and it makes itself felt right at the outset of Michael Kardos's BEFORE HE FINDS HER (Mysterious Press, $25), a well-crafted woman-in-peril narrative with an uncommon premise and an ending you don't see coming a mile away. Kardos uses an interlocking structure of multiple viewpoints and flashbacks to tell the story of 17-year-old Melanie Denison, who has spent most of her life in the witness protection program, living in a trailer with her aunt and uncle in a rustic West Virginia town. In all those years, Melanie has never been to a city, gone to a dance or seen the ocean. But because she has taken some foolish chances, as heroines in peril tend to do, she's secretly acquired a boyfriend, become pregnant and blown her protective cover. The man Melanie has been hiding from all these years is her father, Ramsey Miller, a long-haul trucker who had a psychotic breakdown after seeing the Grand Canyon. ("You don't matter as much as you think you do, the canyon told him, so lighten up.") Somehow, that directive inspired him to kill his wife and perhaps now, after all these years, to return for his daughter. Melanie is interesting enough, but the person you can't forget is her father. IT TAKES NERVE to make the protagonist of your first novel a print journalist, as Elisabeth de Mariaffi does in the devil YOU KNOW (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, $24.99). When the story opens in 1993, we're back in the dark ages of digital technology and Evie Jones, a cub reporter on the Toronto Free Press, is discovering the joys of working on a computer. Server crashes and screen freezes aside, this new tool certainly makes it easier for her to research an assignment on all the women and girls - including one of her childhood friends - who have gone missing in the past 10 years, the presumed victims of a serial killer known as the Scarborough Rapist. De Mariaffi delivers the requisite heart-in-mouth moments of pure paranoia, but she balances these thrills with shrewd character studies and the odd nugget of wisdom. Like the words of a mother who explains why women are ravenous readers of true crime stories: It's not to scare ourselves, "it's so we learn how to get away." IT'S THE SUMMER of 1942 in Maureen Jennings's latest home-front mystery, NO KNOWN GRAVE (McClelland & Stewart, paper, $22.95), and a group of severely wounded soldiers have found sanctuary with the nursing nuns at St. Anne's Convalescent Hospital. But nothing is sacred in wartime, and the double murder of a staff instructor and his 16-year-old son brings Detective Inspector Tom Tyler to this converted manor house in the rural Shropshire town of Ludlow. Jennings's unusual iteration of the classic country house whodunit presents a pool of suspects who are blind or missing limbs or suffering from shell shock - or are Anglican nuns. Meanwhile, life goes on without them in a town bustling with women pulling shifts at munitions factories, Italian P.O.W.s working on farms and young ladies signing up to be police officers.