Boar Island

HOW DO YOU soften up a tough-guy hero anyway? The conventional approach is to make him a widowed or divorced dad who pines for his little girl. That, or give him some icky disease. With these and other clichés so close to hand, it's actually refreshing to pick up THE SECOND GIRL (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26), a sweaty crime novel by the veteran police detective David Swinson, and come across a protagonist with a cocaine addiction. Frank Marr's drug habit goes to explain why, other than the obligatory "attitude problem," he was forced into early retirement from the Washington, D.C., police department and now works as a private investigator for a lawyer he's sweet on. It also explains why Marr is staking out a drug house in a nasty part of town - not to put the dealers out of business, but to steal their product. Imagine his surprise when he finally makes his move and discovers Amanda, a bruised and brainwashed 16-year-old from Virginia chained up in the bathroom. Like other impressionable teenagers seduced by flashy dealers, Amanda was being groomed for work in a brothel, and when word goes out about her rescue, Marr finds his services in demand by parents of other missing girls. Aside from his drug dependency, Marr's real secret is that he's a big old softy. Although brutal, even murderous, when dealing with pimps and drug dealers, on some sad cases, this decent, complicated man feels bad taking a client's money. Despite a pledge to steer clear of cases involving children, which often end badly, he agrees to look for another runaway. But this girl, Miriam Gregory, has taken to her new life and fights like a pro from being rescued. "After this job, I'm done with teenagers," Marr swears, especially "suburban white girls on crack." If there's any comfort in managing a drug habit, being outwitted by teenage girls and trying not to kill people, it's knowing that, to old friends on the force, "you'll always be one of us." WE'RE OFF TO the rugged northern coast of Maine in boar island (Minotaur, $26.99), by Nevada Barr, who sets all her mysteries amid the natural grandeur of our national parks. Anna Pigeon, the weathered law-enforcement park ranger who gives this long-running series its sturdy backbone, has been recalled from Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado and temporarily assigned to the assorted land areas that make up Acadia. This places her in the middle of the raging "lobster wars," a territorial dispute among Maine fishermen angling for survival in their dwindling industry. As usual in this series, the most vivid scenes occur outdoors. An eerie underwater sequence captures the weighted silence in which a solitary lobster poacher goes night diving. A search by water for a girl and her dog, lost on a fogbound coast, casts another beautiful setting in a dangerous light. But this time out, the bond between Anna and nature seems to have frayed, strained by the author's attempt to draw too many other characters into this private world. Although Barr effectively delves into virgin territory by exploring the mind of a murderer, the gaggle of Colorado friends who followed Anna east are too much baggage for someone who works best when she works alone. LOST AND GONE FOREVER (Putnam, $27) is a hoot. The latest entry in Alex Grecian's lurid series of Victorian melodramas expands on the author's obsessive interest in Jack the Ripper with another potboiler in which Saucy Jack is alive and well and still tormenting Inspector Walter Day of Scotland Yard's elite new Murder Squad. The language is ripe, if not entirely in period, and the plot, which turns on the fate of the missing Day, is a hot mess. But Grecian introduces a fantastically devilish pair of bounty hunters who call themselves Mr. and Mrs. Parker ("As long as he remained alert, Mrs. Parker posed no danger to him," according to the besotted Mr. Parker) and creates some extravagantly overwritten scenes in which a majestic emporium called Plumm's is ceremoniously erected and oh-so-carelessly destroyed. Although Jack appears to have dispatched the Parkers at the end, the resurrection of those Grand Guignol figures shouldn't be a problem for an inspired fabulist like Grecian. IN SEVEN DAYS DEAD (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne, $25.99), another atmospheric mystery by the Canadian author John Farrow, the wild and windswept island of Grand Manan proves an invigorating holiday spot - provided visitors survive the treacherous crossing over the Bay of Fundy. Inspector Émile Cinq-Mars, a retired detective from the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal, happens to be here on vacation on the stormy night that Alfred Orrock dies. "Boss and owner of everything" on the island, according to those who loathed the man, this tinpot despot didn't deserve his peaceful death, any more than he deserved the loyalty of his daughter, Madeleine, or the islanders who depended on him for survival. Farrow is an authoritative writer who creates characters with depth and plots that say something about them. (Even a minor character like a burnt-out officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police makes a strong impression on his "do-or-die posting.") But the author's true forte is setting, especially rock-cliff islands lashed by storms, buffeted by winds and clinging to generational secrets that poison the lives of people who keep reminding one another to "keep your knives sharp."