ne of the most remarkable things about the latest entry in John Lescroart’s series of legal thrillers featuring San Francisco attorney Dismas Hardy is the utter freshness of the material. Through a half dozen outings (The 13th Juror, The Mercy Rule), Lescroart has managed to keep his regular characters three-dimensional and consistently interesting. In The Hearing, the characters that have populated Lescroart’s previous novels find new intrigue in the political and social worlds of San Francisco.

When a prominent black San Francisco attorney is found murdered, the key suspect is a homeless heroin addict found at the scene holding the gun and her jewelry. Because it is an election year, the politically ambitious and ruthless District Attorney Sharron Pratt decides to press for the death penalty to reverse her soft-on-crime image. The suspect’s brother is a close friend of Lescroart’s suave Irish lawyer, and against his better judgment, Dismas Hardy is persuaded to take the case.

As he digs into the evidence, trying to find a way to spare his client’s life, Hardy finds the case has strange ties to other political and legal goings-on in the city. An almost incestuous relationship between business, the prosecutor’s office and the murder victim has Hardy wondering, in spite of damning physical evidence, if his client actually had anything to do with the murder. The cop on the case, the black Jewish detective Abe Glitsky, who has reasons of his own for seeing the killer receive ultimate justice, also begins to have doubts about the guilt of the accused. Together, he and Hardy try to unravel the truth from a thicket of corruption and venality. Lescroart’s story is enriched by a careful rendering of the city that gives his legal thrillers a special flair. Even with a sharply disapproving portrait of corruption in city politics, Lescroart’s love of San Francisco comes through on every page.

With plenty of legal twists and turns, The Hearing will be an irresistible read for Lescroart’s legion of fans and all those who appreciate a well-crafted courtroom drama.

Michael Grollman is a freelance writer in New Jersey.

A speculative spy thriller Tim Powers is a masterful melder of fact and fiction, reality and unreality, realism and surrealism. This foremost North American magic realist (author of The Anubis Gates, World Fantasy Award-winner Last Call, Earthquake Weather and many others) mesmerizes readers with hidden layers of plots and conspiracies. His latest novel, Declare, is vintage Powers speculative fiction based on documented facts. Fact: Kim Philby was a British intelligence operative who defected to the Soviet Union. Fact: Philby worked for both sides and precipitated the greatest British cold war spy scandal. Fact: Philby spent years in the Middle East with his father, a noted Arabist. Powers excels at connecting historical dots his own way, placing Philby precisely where he was at any given time, but with different and far more fanciful motivations. In Nazi-occupied Paris, British double agent Andrew Hale proves a worthy nemesis for Philby, though his connection to the stuttering spy remains mysterious until a chilling climax on Mount Ararat’s frozen peak. In the early 1960s, Hale is called back to atone for his failure on Mount Ararat years before, when the men he led were either killed or driven insane. Hale’s journey is a mind-blowing trip through the cold war.

Blending his Le CarrŽ-style plot with history, theology, the Arabian Nights and the true nature of the ankh (anchor), Powers proves how vibrant fantasy can be. If you yearn for an original, innovative author, you can’t miss with Tim Powers.

ÊDeep South, the latest installment in the wildly popular Anna Pigeon series, finds our intrepid park ranger assigned to the Natchez Trace Parkway in rural Mississippi. In the wee hours of the morning, as she pilots her Rambler (can she be the only heroine in history who drives a Rambler?) through the pre-dawn gloom, she spies a hand painted sign nailed to a tree: REPENT. Then another, this one riddled with bullet holes: REPENT; FINAL WARNING. Anna has been on the road for 22 hours straight, surely a record for a Rambler, en route from her last posting at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, and she is beginning to have the unsettling feeling that she has made a mistake.

Her meager possessions unloaded from a small U-Haul trailer, Anna settles in to her role as district ranger. As is usually the case in Barr’s novels (and Anna’s life), things don’t stay quiet for long. It seems a local high school girl has gone missing on prom night. When Anna’s black lab, Taco, unearths a bloody scarf near the site of a recent disturbance, Anna suspects the worst. Her fears are borne out with the discovery of a girl’s body, hastily disposed of in the deep woods. The bloody sheet over the girl’s head, Ku Klux Klan style, has the earmarks of a political bombshell.

The plot thickens as Anna discovers that the Caucasian victim was carrying on a secret (well, not entirely) relationship with a black college football hero. Add to that the fact that her prom date, an obnoxious white jock, is withholding information on the crime, and you have the beginnings of a case that could have racial implications far beyond the boundaries of Mississippi.

Several of the persistent regional stereotypes are addressed in Deep South, including Civil War reenactments, old time religion, the lingering racial prejudices on both sides of the color line, and even the high school girls’ predilection for wearing copious quantities of cosmetics. As with the previous Anna Pigeon novels, Deep South is fast-paced and well-crafted. Ms. Barr is on familiar ground here, as she makes her home in Mississippi, and has served as a park ranger in the Natchez Trace Parkway area.

Bruce Tierney is a writer in Nashville, Tennessee.

All you really need for a good nature thriller is a scary animal attack. True North supplies a satisfactory one, and throws in a scary human one as well, so nothing else is required for the reader here but a comfortable sofa and the off switch on the television remote control.

Don’t let the author’s formidable name spook you into saving her first novel for your more literary moments. True, this book is thoughtful, and will raise your consciousness about the anomalous position of Native Americans in the state of Alaska. Mainly though, it wants to alert you to the extraordinary ambiance of the place and give you a thrill along the way.

Bailey Lockhart carries baggage from a traumatic New England past when she becomes a bush pilot in the wilds of Alaska. She keeps the past at bay by buying a piece of wilderness land and burying herself in the routine of sheer survival. For six years it works, but suddenly the arrival of a naively arrogant young couple forces her out of her protected isolation and reopens her cache of hurt. What’s more, this painful episode comes at a time when the local native population has begun to splinter in its varying reactions to U.

S. government policies, and she is caught between renewed discomfort as a white outsider and her affection for the people, especially Kash, the leader of the more peaceful local political movement.

Eventually she is forced by circumstance and coincidence to come to terms with her wounded and wounding memories though not before death and a clarified love intervene.

Kafka is a certified wilderness emergency medical technician, comfortable in the wilds of both Alaska and Wisconsin, and has taught writing and literature at the University of Michigan and elsewhere. Her early brashly driven prose softens into a lover’s appreciation of a familiar country, where the human beings do not always live up to the land. As first novels so often do, this one improves before your eyes, gaining skill and grace with each succeeding page.

Alaska will always steal the show, of course, but read this one for the traditional thriller values of suspense and a good story. Popcorn is optional.

Maude McDaniel is a reviewer in Cumberland, Maryland.

If you’ve read one Larry Bond novel (The Enemy Within, Red Phoenix, etc.), you’ve probably read them all. Of course, if you’ve read them all, then you’re like me, and you’ve continued to enjoy his escapist, globe-trotting thrillers and tales of semi-plausible headlong plunges toward the end of the world as we know it. Do the good guys win? I’ll give you one good guess. Are the bad guys really, really bad . . . I mean bad on a world-shaking, civilization-destroying level? Sure are. Is the technology pretty darned cool and yet at the same time frighteningly real? Yes again, and that’s the heart of Bond’s success, especially in his latest, Day of Wrath. Bond, who was an uncredited partner and consultant on Tom Clancy’s early books, knows his stuff, and his expertise shows in descriptions of everything from handguns to nuclear missiles.

The heroes of 1997’s Enemy Within, Colonel Peter Thorn and FBI Special Agent Helen Gray, return in Day of Wrath to battle yet another Middle Eastern terrorist overlord bent on destroying the decadent country of America. (One quibble: It seems sort of easy and predictable to make the villain an Arab . . . again. Surely there are bad guys elsewhere. In Bond’s favor, though: The top henchmen of key villain Prince Ibrahim are ex-East German secret policeman. It’s a new world.) The action moves from the forests of Russia to the streets of Berlin to Washington, D.

C.’s Virginia suburbs, with stops for gunplay at many places along the way. The reason for all the chasing is that Thorn and Gray are the only people who know the secret of Ibrahim’s “Operation,” a secret I won’t reveal here, but suffice to say the title of the book is appropriate. The duo is forced to take extreme measures to safeguard themselves and the secret in a typically nail-biting race to the “whew-that-was-close” climax. Along the way, the romance between Thorn and Gray that budded in the previous Bond book blooms brightly. Their between-the-gunshots romantic by-play seems a little forced sometimes, but gives a more human flavor to the out-there proceedings.

However out-there the plot gets, the kernel of truth and dangerous possibility that lies at its heart forces the reader to consider the “what-if factor.” I hope that if there’s a real Prince Ibrahim out there, we have more than just two people to stop him, but for now, the resourceful Thorn and the sturdy Gray will do nicely.

Reviewed by James Buckley, Jr.

n his latest thriller, Deep Sleep, Charles Wilson returns to one of his favorite themes: murder and mayhem triggered by a foreign invasion of the mind. The author of several best-selling scientific thrillers, Wilson has a knack for crafting riveting plot lines around kernels of scientific fact. In Deep Sleep, he focuses on treatment for sleep disorders, and ventures into a mysterious world of mind games played with hypnosis, Cajun voodoo and hallucinatory drugs. Wilson has chosen the South Louisiana bayou country as the setting for this absorbing tale of local culture with a 21st century face.

The action begins when a local deputy sheriff discovers the body of a young girl raped and beaten on the grounds of the South Louisiana Sleep Disorder Institute. The macabre scene reads like something by Edgar Allan Poe an antebellum mansion shrouded in mist rising from surrounding crocodile-infested mangrove swamps and partially obscured by hanging moss. When the victim is identified as a patient, Senior Deputy Mark French locks down the institute and takes a closer look at its fantasy fulfillment program, one that recreates wealthy patients’ dreams and fantasies with enough realism that they are recalled as true experiences by those undergoing the treatment.

French soon establishes that another patient is missing and may have stolen a car. Other suspects include a grotesquely deformed boy and his hardscrabble parents eking out a primitive living on the edge of the swamp, the institute’s sinister director and several members of her staff with violent criminal records. While tracking the missing patient through the steamy swamp, the deputies come across two more sadistically murdered victims whose deaths suggest that a second psychopath may be on the loose. The pace accelerates as French closes in on at least one of the killers. The stormy night scene of the hunters racing through a lightning-laced swamp with flashlights reinforced by a helicopter’s searchlight equals Hollywood’s best. Wilson is even able to weave a thin but appealing romantic thread into the violent tapestry that makes Deep Sleep a memorable reading experience.

John Messer writes from Ludington, Michigan.

t voyeurism if the voyeur, the watcher, has permission to watch? Television shows like Survivor reel in huge audiences by giving viewers the sense that they have a secret window to the participant’s personal, private moments. But if someone knows they are being watched, in fact, invites the viewing, perhaps the table turns, the exhibitionist holds the cards, and the mesmerized voyeur becomes victim to the exhibitionist. David Ellis uses this seductive cat and mouse game to the hilt in his tautly crafted, provocative first novel, Line of Vision.

The protagonist, Marty Kalish, is a successful investment banker who has been to law school. He knows enough about law, lawyers and police matters to make him either smart enough to get away with murder or too smart for his own good. We’re not sure which. This is because the story is told in first person and while Kalish is devilishly fascinating, he may not be the most reliable source for helping us determine his guilt or innocence. For one thing, he lies.

For another, he seems to have an inability to accept responsibility and achieve fulfilling relationships, even with close family members. (In a sense, he became an unwitting “voyeur” as a child, and a witness to a haunting secret he harbors deep inside.) And finally, he’s an outright Peeping Tom lurking outside Rachel Reindhard’s house in the cold and dark, waiting to see her in the window. “A grown man sneaking outside a married woman’s house. Pathetic. Depraved. Perverted. All of the above?” he asks himself and we are not sure of the answer, having become voyeurs ourselves watching him watch her! Deciding whether Kalish is a hero or a hedonist is part of the intrigue of this novel, and Ellis does a remarkable job of keeping us in suspense on all fronts until the final, riveting pages.

Line of Vision is a legal thriller, complete with lawyer wrangling, questions of evidence and a hair-raising courtroom drama, but it is also a character study in which the mystery of Kalish the man is as spellbinding as the mystery surrounding the murder. An action-packed page-turner, this book will not only make you wonder “who is watching whom?” but force you to question the morality of looking just because there is something titillating to see. Is it sometimes wise, we must ask, to limit our own “line of vision”? Linda Stankard writes from Cookeville, Tennessee.