While forensic anthropologist Elizabeth McPherson relaxes at a "psychiatric retreat" coming to grips with the death of her husband, a pair of seductive women blaze a trail across the rural South in The PMS Outlaws. At roadhouses and out-of-the-way taverns, they double-team local boys, promising pleasures hitherto only ogled in the pages of behind-the-counter magazines. After leaving their unwitting prey naked, handcuffed, and um, unrequited (not to mention relieved of their wallets and car keys), the desperadoes flee into the night. Little do they know they're on a collision course with Elizabeth McPherson. McCrumb explores the notion that physical beauty is the ultimate currency, tempering her observations with good humor and more than a trace of Appalachian charm.

The PMS Outlaws
By Sharyn McCrumb
Ballantine, $24
ISBN 0345382315

Andrew Vachss's character Burke (no first name) is, simply put, the baddest, meanest gunslinger in modern fiction. He has spent most of his life in and out of reform schools and jails. There is no license for what he does ("License . . . , we don't need no stinkin' license . . ."): he takes cases in which someone was grievously wronged and makes them right, the law be damned. His particular area of expertise is crime involving children; in short, he goes after the perpetrators with the vengeance of a hellhound. In Dead and Gone, Burke becomes the prey, set up to be murdered in a phony ransom drop. It is very nearly successful. Burke is hospitalized with a bullet in his head, and one of his closest companions is left dead at the scene. Before it's over, his enemies will wish they had done the job right, for the last thing in the world you want is a wounded Burke on your trail.

Dead and Gone
By Andrew Vachss
Alfred A. Knopf, $25
ISBN 0375411216

Pagan Babies, the latest from Elmore Leonard, features a cast of zany misfits: an American smuggler who is now a priest in Rwanda, possibly; a recently released jailbird who, in a moment of pique, ran down her boyfriend in a crosswalk; said boyfriend, a charming con man who has seen half of the bedrooms in Detroit; and a group of mobsters who bring new meaning to the word inept. As is always the case with Leonard's novels, the story is quirky and convoluted, the characters are one step ahead of the law, and the dialogue is absolutely first rate.

Pagan Babies
By Elmore Leonard
Dell, $24.95
ISBN 0385333927


Audio, $25.95
ISBN 0553527517

Tip of the icepick

Much of the time, mysteries involving the clergy seem somewhat dated and stiff. There are exceptions, of course, like Ralph McInerny's Father Dowling series and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. A new addition to those ranks is Claire Munnings's Overnight Float, the first in a promised series of novels featuring chaplain Rosemary Stubbs. Stubbs was the CFO of a Fortune 500 company when another sort of fortune took the life of her husband in a boating accident. Searching for some meaning to the chaos of her life, Stubbs enrolls in divinity school. Following graduation she is offered a job as a college chaplain in rural Vermont; within days of her arrival, her only friend in the town is murdered -- drowned -- bringing to the forefront many of Stubbs's repressed feelings of horror and guilt about her husband's similar death. She realizes once again that the only redemption is in finding the hidden meanings, the answers that will solve the questions surrounding her friend's murder. The writing is literate and insightful with perhaps a bit of a feminist bent, not surprising when you consider that Claire Munnings is a pseudonym for two prominent academics, Jill Ker Conway (author of The Road to Coorain), former president of Smith College, and Elizabeth Kennan, former president of Mount Holyoke.

Overnight Float
By Claire Munnings
W.W. Norton, $23.95
ISBN 0393038491