L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

All the world’s the same, only parts of it are different; and one of the world’s most different parts is Southern California, which features so largely in Sue Grafton’s alphabet series. Fifteenth of that ilk, “O Is For Outlaw� demonstrates that, for PIs as for venison, ripeness is all. The gossamer-tough figure of Kinsey Millhone gets better every time; and the distance between L.A. and Kinsey’s home base in Santa Barbara--sorry, Santa Teresa--seems to shrink as the intrepid investigator mounts her VW bug at the drop of a cellular phone to dash into action.

“Outlaw� begins with a nudge to aficionados of exercise machines that Kinsey patronizes and continues with recall of a long-lost husband (Southern California is littered with them) whose memory resurfaces just ahead of his street-shot corpse. Is Kinsey being set up--to what end and by whom? Dredging past shallows for some answers, the chirpy heroine also stirs the mud of other people’s lives, uncovers unanticipated criminal activities, consumes quantities of junk food, solves serious fashion dilemmas like what to wear at a Montecito cocktail party and makes a strong case that investigation is research spiced with guile and crowned by luck.

Kinsey points out that pro bono means “for boneheads.� Since that is her chief self-assigned task here, “Outlaw� is weaker than Grafton’s usual fare because Millhone is her own client and we care little for the object of her quest. But the chatter is as bright, the descriptions as colorful as we have come to expect, the menaces comfortingly benign and the ending satisfyingly brief and bloody.

There is more blood and less comfort in Faye Kellerman’s latest, “Jupiter’s Bones.� The kooky leader of a kooky cult called the Order of the Rings of God dies in suspicious circumstances. Police investigations run into weird followers and weirder power struggles for succession; then the plot thickens as two girl cultists disappear. Have they absconded or have they been kidnapped? Are the cultists bonkers or just hostile? Are the uncanny characters cannily deceptive like California peaches: come-hither on the outside, on the inside insipid? Amid the standard medley of media, politics and rampant nuts, LAPD lieutenant Peter Decker investigates with flair and empathy as usual and, as usual, the course of true police work never does run smooth.

Decker has family problems not unrelated to the bizarreries of Orthodox Judaism, which sometimes look little different from those of the cult he is investigating. Par for the L.A. course, ultra-violence takes over, more corpses surface, malignance looms and then explodes, first in a Waco-like standoff around the order’s bunker, then in a predictably shattering, blood-spattered finale. After which a coda ties up loose ends that no longer matter. The switchback effect makes Kellerman’s 11th Decker thriller less thrilling than its predecessors and curiously uneven for a pro: slow start, accelerating pace, gripping culmination, then sag into an unnecessarily mushy end.

It is not Kellerman’s fault that police lieutenants are too often addressed as “loo� (suggestive of “where can I find the loo?�); but a friend should tell her that, when danger lurks, babies are best kept to a low profile. Too many babies clog the action, as they do in “Jupiter’s Bones.�

Linda Fairstein is a genuine assistant district attorney, bureau chief of Manhattan’s Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit, and her writing, unlike that of many lawyers, reflects professional competence: lucid, athletic, authentic and strong on detail. “Cold Hit� is slang for a successful link between forensic evidence and an individual’s DNA, and the book turns out to be a real page-turner, with heavy exposure to police procedure and camaraderie. Expect no linear narrative here but a pointillist puzzle waiting to come together, lots of disparate fragments working their way to a solution.

A posh woman’s corpse washed up on the Hudson’s shores opens a can of poisonous worms: marital infidelity; office politics; rape, serial and otherwise; murder for hire, for profit, for passion or simply for fun; and art, lots of art, art thefts, art scams: It’s “Law and Order� played several octaves higher and with never a moment’s peace. Clearly, “what a D.A.’s office lacks in financial reward, it makes up for in drama and intrigue.� But just as clearly, Alexandra Cooper, Fairstein’s alter ego in charge of Manhattan’s Sex Crimes Unit, does better with a private income and a cottage on Martha’s Vineyard than her equally cheerful and more bibulous detective sidekicks. Since they have to deal with six or 16 cases at once, not all are solved by the final page. But we are left feeling that, even though “the lunatics are really running the asylum when it comes to the criminal courts,� the NYPD are on top of the job. So what else is true?

The blurb calls Reginald Hill’s “Arms and the Women� his most astonishing work yet, and astounding it certainly is: perplexing, paradoxical, prurient and peculiar. Also fantastical, odd, affected, flaunting, meretricious, egregiously overwritten and preciously literary. Yet, if given half a chance, it will creep up on you, take over as ivy does, encourage you ever so often to skip pages so as to get on with the main action, because that gets more gripping as the spell grows stronger.

The blurb counts Hill’s fans by the legion. Even if they’re no more than a corporal’s guard, the faithful ones will recognize Det. Supt. Andy Dalziel, Inspector Peter Pascoe and their supporting cast of Yorkshire constabulary at odds with ill-defined evildoers; and the persistent will ignore nagging diversions until they can tell the difference between maze and muddle, incoherent and intricate.

It all starts with a road accident in the dales between Lancashire and Yorkshire, leads on through odd incursions on Pascoe’s family, to arms smuggling, money laundering, embezzlement, fraud, Colombian terrorists, retired IRA loons, do-gooding activists and a lot of confusion conveyed in baroque lit-speak. There is Ellie Pascoe and her novel-in-progress that keeps popping up in italics, there’s a released nut case writing a post-graduate thesis on revenge and retribution as so many post-graduates would like to do, there’s little Rosie Pascoe and her littler dog and a scattering of friends and foes, some dubious, some dotty or, as Hill nicely puts it, “two leeks short of a harvest supper.�

Perhaps because the title keeps its promise and some of the major roles are played by intriguing women, Hill’s collection of characters is beguiling. Though Hill is a bit of a windbag, his cherubs blow a witty wind to fill his sails. Read for yourself and see.

Finally, Elizabeth George and her players. Two corpses in a dark circle of prehistoric stones in Derbyshire; a stack of stubborn cops hot on wrong trails, an equally stubborn woman cop with low seniority on the right trail, a gentlemanly detective inspector, wrongheaded and newly wed, sent down from Scotland Yard to connect corpses with causalities. But proper sinners prove hard to locate in “In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner�: misconjectured suspects, blinkered bigwigs, sexual deviance, S & M and social revelations all mislead. And you can never tell what creatures will scurry and slither when you move a moorland rock or rake an English lawn.

Because this is England (and George), violence is used economically, the most bellicose character and the most prone to sue is an American, while natives, even police, betray emotion by flushing. The geography and acoustics of class society, on the other hand, are much in evidence; as are fashionably intrepid women investigators, tarts and helpmeets too, equally at ease amid bucolic greenery or urban grunge. Everything moves at a good pace, unravels satisfactorily, astounds and absorbs in an engaging way. How nice to come across a reliable product that reflects consistent quality control!