The necessary death of Lewis Winter

STARRING IN A Jeffery Deaver thriller isn't all it's cracked up to be. Despite their sterling reputations, his sleuths are in constant danger of being outclassed by their preternaturally cunning adversaries. This is what happens in SOLITUDE CREEK (Grand Central, $28) when Kathryn Dance, an agent with the California Bureau of Investigation, takes on Antioch March, a newfangled killer who likes to scare people into causing their own deaths. "He plays with perceptions, sensations, panic," Dance discovers, leaving the actual killing to his victims themselves. A small, contained fire outside the Solitude Creek roadhouse, a tractor-trailer blocking the exit doors and a single phone call to raise the false alarm - that's all it takes for 200 people to turn on one another in an "animal frenzy" to get out of the club. Marveling at the deadly efficiency of his own work, the man who caused this chaos reflects on how "people could erase a million years of evolution in seconds." This crafty fiend is partial to witty "event" homicides like the book party at the Bay View hall that he orchestrates into a scene of mass hysteria, with guests crashing through windows and hurling themselves into the sea. But he'll also indulge in more modest entertainments, finding a nice viewing spot on a cliff at Monterey Bay and waiting for unwary tourists to venture too far out on the rocks, only to be swept away by a churning wave. Dance manages to deflect some of March's homicidal ambitions, but although he calls her "the Great Strategist," her tactics are nowhere near as ingenious (or as droll) as his own machinations. While Dance may not be able to compete with a flamboyant showoff like March, she's excellent as the calm but constantly moving right hand that Deaver uses to distract us from what his busy left hand is doing. Applying classic principles of indirection, he gives her an important organized-crime case to keep track of, along with single-mother headaches caused by her 10-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son, who have picked this moment to act out their growing pains. Mom needs all her wits about her right now if she hopes to foil one of Deaver's most diabolical villains. JUST WHEN YOU think you've got her all figured out, Joyce Carol Oates sneaks up from behind and confounds you yet again. She does it with a wicked flourish in JACK OF SPADES (Mysterious Press, $24), a "tale of suspense" written in the voice of Andrew J. Rush, an author of "best-selling mystery-suspense novels with a touch of the macabre," who is proud to be known as "the gentleman's Stephen King." Oates gives him a nice wife, a nice family, a nice house in the New Jersey suburbs and the carefully modulated accents of an arrogant stuffed shirt. That changes drastically when he speaks in the more assertive voice of his pseudonymous alter ego, Jack of Spades, who furtively writes "cruder, more visceral, more frankly horrific" potboilers that earn little money and attract an unstable fan base, but gratify a deeply felt need. Oates writes sparingly about the trauma that gave birth to the now rampaging Jack. It's only when Rush is sued for plagiarism by an unknown author that his repressed guilt flares up - irrational, no doubt, but not unfamiliar to writers who "steal" the identities of living people as they give birth to characters of their own creation, including monsters like Jack. A COZY VILLAGE mystery needn't be quaint, and in his blissful novels about Bruno Courrèges, the police chief in the provincial French town of St. Denis, in the Dordogne, Martin Walker usually manages to balance the idyllic charms of his fictional village with substantive issues of concern to Bruno's neighbors. But he seems to have lost that sense of balance in THE CHILDREN RETURN (Knopf, $24.95), with an overstuffed political plot about killers from a radical mosque in Toulouse sent to find "the Engineer," an autistic local Muslim boy with a talent for bomb making. That should be enough excitement for his little town, but Walker also digs into the history of Vichy France for a subplot about Jewish children given sanctuary in St. Denis during World War II. It's time for the grape harvest in this lush valley, but Bruno is far too busy chasing terrorists to devote much time to food and drink and the troubled history of this beautiful region. THE NECESSARY DEATH OF LEWIS WINTER (Mulholland, paper, $15), the first book in Malcolm Mackay's brutal but elegantly constructed Glasgow Trilogy, features a gifted young hit man named Calum MacLean, who is hired by a gangland boss to fill in while his main gunman, Frank MacLeod, recovers from hip replacement surgery. Frank is on his feet again in the second book, how a gunman says GOODBYE (Mulholland, paper, $15), and very happy to be working again. ("Sunshine retirement is for other people. He wants the rain of Glasgow. The tension of the job. The thrill of it. That's his life. Oh, it's so good to be back.") But in THE SUDDEN ARRIVAL OF VIOLENCE (Mulholland, paper, $15) we return to Calum as he weighs the odds of getting out of the profession - alive, that is. Mackay's novels aren't easy to read. He writes short, brisk sentences, blunt and direct, almost clinical. "This isn't a gentleman's club, after all," we're told. "This is business." You either like his affectless style or you don't. I do.

British author Mackay makes his U.S. debut with the dark first in his Glasgow trilogy. A powerful Glasgow boss, Peter Jamieson, hires Calum MacLean, a freelance hit man, to take out Lewis Winter, a smalltime drug dealer who has stepped on some dangerous toes. While 29-year-old Calum is a familiar type, a tough loner with few meaningful human connections, Mackay makes him oddly sympathetic. All the characters, from a police detective investigating a murder to Winter's opportunistic girlfriend, come across as three-dimensional. The author also does a good job de-romanticizing the life of the hit man, capturing the dullness of Calum's days as he goes through his preparations for the job. Understated dialogue shows that the characters know how to read what is not said, as well as what is said. Mackay doesn't break any new ground, but tartan noir fans will be satisfied. Agent: Grainne Fox, Fletcher & Company. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Already a hit in Britain, this first installment in Mackay's "Glasgow Trilogy"--Mulholland is publishing the second and third volumes, How a Gunman Says Goodbye and The Sudden Arrival of Violence, simultaneously-is a welcome, hard-hitting addition to the tartan noir genre. In the violent criminal underworld of Glasgow, it's imperative to know your place and stay there. Otherwise you might find yourself on the wrong side of a man like Calum MacLean. A freelance killer of sorts, he's currently working for the powerful Peter Jamieson, tasked with taking out the titular Lewis Winter, a small-time drug dealer who's usurping Jamieson's turf. Unlike a typical whodunit, the story features a killer whose identity is never in question. But Mackay ratchets up the suspense by introducing a wide cast of characters, from the cool, detached MacLean and the surprisingly sympathetic Winter trying to please his gold digger girlfriend to the cops, both straight and dirty, tasked with investigating the murder. VERDICT To loosely paraphrase Mackay (and Raymond Chandler), it's easy to write a crime novel; it's hard to write a crime novel well. And this unrelenting look at the grimy underbelly of Glasgow's criminal underworld does it very well. [See Prepub Alert, 11/1/14.] © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.