Third Time Still Charms in Michael Malone’s Crime Series

The arrival of Michael Malone’s new novel, “First Lady� (Sourcebooks Landmark, 434 pages, $24) marks the latest entry in what surely must be the longest-running three-book series in mystery history. It was way back in 1983 that his splendid novel “Uncivil Seasons� introduced his two main continuing characters, North Carolina lawmen Justin Savile and Cuddy Mangum. That work was narrated by Savile, a broken-down aristocrat whose ancestors founded Hillston, the tight little college town in which he and the brilliant but bullheaded Mangum investigate homicides.

Six years passed before Malone gave us an update, “Time’s Witness.� It was more than just a sequel. The narrative duties had been turned over to Mangum. As was expected of someone who cherished the past, Savile had railed against the march of time and the ways in which his town was changing. Mangum, a populist recently elevated to chief of police, was a man of the New South interested mainly in the now and focused strongly on current events. In “Lady,� though seemingly only a year or so has passed in Hillston time, it’s been more than a decade of real time since we last left our heroes, a period during which Malone successfully guided the fates of two television soap operas.

With Savile as our guide once again, an air of melancholy prevails. “The South has not only forgotten the past,� he tells us early on, “it has forgotten the whole idea of the past.� His mother is in the hospital, dying. His beautiful son, whose birth ended “Witness� on just the right hopeful note, has passed away. The boy’s death has placed such a pressure on him and his wife that she’s left him, possibly for good. Mangum is still hopelessly in love with the wife of the philandering governor. In addition, the normally crime-free town has suddenly become Murderville.

The prose is as elegant as in the earlier mysteries (and in the author’s mainstream novels, notably, “Handling Sin�). And the cast of characters, many continuing from those books, are presented in full, an odd and intriguing enough bunch to make anyone forget those pushy eccentrics who hung out in “The Garden of Good and Evil.�

But, possibly a result of the author’s television years, he gives us too much of their back stories, slowing the novel’s pace to a crawl when it should be racing toward a solution of the mystery.

Also, he has unwisely brought an internationally famous hard-drinking, easy-loving Irish singer to town on a performing tour, the better to involve her in the murders and in Savile’s life.

Next to the flesh and blood townsfolk, the stunningly beautiful, fabulously successful but sadly wistful songstress swigging her booze seems to have staggered over from a Jackie Collins roman a clef .

Regardless, Savile and Mangum remain great company, the mystery element is strong, and Malone has lost none of his uncommon ability to mix humor and heartbreak.

Newcomers should probably begin with the earlier Savile-Mangum novels, which, happily, the publisher is returning to print in paperback.

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Rebecca Rothenberg was a Renaissance woman, a musician and composer (of country and western ballads), an epidemiologist, an amateur botanist and a talented writer of intelligent and compelling mysteries set in the San Joaquin Valley. Three of her botany-themed novels, narrated by continuing heroine Claire Sharples, a very human plant pathologist transplanted to Kern County from New England, were published before the author’s untimely death in 1998 (the result of a brain tumor). A planned but not finished Book Four has now been completed by her friend Taffy Cannon, another accomplished crime writer with a penchant for plant life (“Guns and Roses�). The result is “The Tumbleweed Murders� (John Daniel and Company/Perseverance Press, $12.95, 240 pages), a seamless tale of danger, adventure and romance spanning five decades of Southern and Central California life and lifestyles.

Like Rothenberg’s acclaimed debut novel, “The Bulrush Murders,� it begins with a peach-blight investigation. In the earlier work, the rotted fruit led to multiple murders and unlawful land development. “Tumbleweed� finds Sharples digging into a century-old crime and the connection it may have to a new death and an oil-and-cotton fiefdom.

It’s a particularly strong and well-conceived plot. There are shrewdly observed descriptions of the country along the Kern River, the locales as well as the locals. (“The Oklahoma in her voice had been as ruthlessly suppressed as her original hair color, but in both cases the roots showed a little.�) There’s also an ingratiating mixture of history and folklore, with an emphasis on the area’s country music scene. And last, but certainly not least, there’s the portrait of Sharples, strong but vulnerable, shy but passionate, self-reliant but lonely, an outsider finally starting to grow accustomed to her surroundings.

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In Carsten Stroud’s “Black Water Transit� (Delacorte, $24.95, 355 pages) Jack Vermillion, an ex-Marine-turned-millionaire shipper agrees to assist in a sting in return for his convict son’s transfer to a less dangerous facility. The sting’s target is ostensibly Earl Pike, a man trying to smuggle weapons out of the country. What no one tells Jack is that Pike is an amazingly resilient, chillingly cold-blooded killer with a fondness for revenge.

Enter the Jay Rats, a joint task force that works with state and federal police. They’re investigating Pike on another matter--the brutal murder of a couple of motorists who showed him bad attitude on the highway. He mistakenly sees their interest as evidence of Vermillion’s betrayal. The sting goes south and the shipper winds up caught between Pike and Valeriana Grecco, a viciously self-serving assistant U.S. attorney.

Stroud knows his weapons and psychos. He also seems well informed on the ways law enforcement bureaucracy works and doesn’t. Though he puts his hero through several stages of hell, there’s never a question as to whether Vermillion will emerge victorious. But how will he escape Pike and turn the tables on the unlovely Grecco? The author has devised several clever twists to achieve that goal, and it will take a very cranky reader indeed not to enjoy every minute of them.

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Dick Lochte reviews mysteries every other week.