n the trail of A Cold Case As decent and democratic and objective as you think yourself to be and probably are, when you watched the movie A Few Good Men and heard Jack Nicholson as the tough Marine colonel shout, “You can’t handle the truth!” you may have felt a small, silent, shameful twinge of agreement. We often want someone to make our problems go away without being told the truth about the messy, not-necessarily-legal ways they were dealt with.

An unspoken understanding of this nature forms part of the background of A Cold Case by Philip Gourevitch, whose previous book We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award. Gourevitch has produced another potential award-winner in this slim account of the solving of a 27-year-old double murder in New York City.

In relating his part of the story to the author, Andy Rosenzweig, chief investigator for the Manhattan district attorney, acknowledges without noticeable bitterness this flexible standard toward truth on the part of the public. However, people who know Rosenzweig tell the author that it was a message from another movie High Noon, in which an upright lawman is abandoned by a spineless citizenry that has most influenced the investigator: This is a twilight world in which the two sides of the law are not always distinct and for which Rosenzweig, though an honorable cop, always felt an affinity.

To call the murder in question here an unsolved crime is not totally accurate: Everyone knew who shot and killed Richie Glennon and Pete McGinn on February 18, 1970, at McGinn’s apartment after having tangled with the pair earlier in the evening at the restaurant McGinn owned. The murderer was Frankie Koehler, a man with an extensive criminal past, including an earlier homicide in 1945 when he was only 15 years old. After the slayings, Koehler simply disappeared.

Rosenzweig knew both victims and liked Glennon especially. He had not been in on the original investigation and was reminded of the case by a chance incident in January 1997. He began to look into it and discovered that somewhere along the line the case had been closed because Koehler had been presumed for no good reason, as it turns out dead.

Rosenzweig got permission to reopen the “cold case.” Gourevitch recounts some neat deduction and legwork until Koehler was tracked down in California, living under another name. The story has about it more than a whiff of Dashiell Hammett (a quotation from one of whose stories serves as an epigraph), the Hammett of the grim, relentless harshness of life.

It is not revealing too much to say that Koehler was captured on a return trip to New York, because half of the book is about Koehler’s confession and defense. In some respects this is the most fascinating part of the story. In the videotaped confession, which Gourevitch says “has come to be regarded at the D.

A.’s office as one of the classic portraits of a criminal personality,” Koehler “is not confessing so much as taking credit for his crimes.” More than once Koehler speaks of his “desire to be understood not only as a murderer but also a sparer of life.” Koehler’s attorney, Murray Richman, a mob lawyer who revels in his lowlife connections, is a piece of work himself. Richman likes criminals for their “simplicity” and believes that “murderers are the straightest guys in the world.” In a way, he makes the reader think of John Mortimer’s British barrister, Horace Rumpole, who also has a fondness for his clients, except that Richman’s criminal contacts are considerably more dangerous and less charming than Rumpole’s “villains.” Koehler’s defense consisted primarily of a war of nerves between Richman and the prosecutors, who were worried about the problems an old case presented. Richman held out for the lowest sentence he could get. As for Koehler, in the letters he wrote while being held on Rikers Island he “seemed to believe the lashes of his own conscience were all the punishment he needed.” When Gourevitch went to California to see where Koehler had lived, he found that the murderer was remembered fondly by those who had known him. When he went to visit Rosenzweig, who had retired to run a bookstore in Rhode Island 12 days before Koehler’s sentencing, he found him working, unofficially, on another case.

The only thing wrong with this book is that it is over too quickly. We hunger to know even more about these intriguing characters.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

Dominick Dunne became a chronicler of criminal justice for the rich and well-connected after his own daughter was murdered in 1982 by her boyfriend. But his fascination with high-profile crime first surfaced during his youth, as he admits in his new book, Justice, in a chapter on the 1943-44 trial and conviction of Wayne Lonergan for the murder of his socialite wife and brewing heiress Patricia Burton. "I was a teenager in boarding school at this time," he writes, "and I remember risking expulsion every afternoon by sneaking into the town of New Milford, Connecticut, during sports period to read the latest accounts in the New York Daily Mirror and the New York Journal American at the local drugstore."

The 18 articles in this collection were written originally for Vanity Fair. They cover the trials of the Menendez brothers for the shotgun slaying of their parents, of Claus von Bulow for the attempted murder of his wife and the still-in-progress proceedings against Kennedy kinsman Michael Skakel for the bludgeoning death of young Martha Moxley. But Dunne devotes most of these pieces to the endlessly absorbing trials of O.J. Simpson both the one he won and the one he lost. Dunne relates that he became such a familiar fixture in court that during the civil trial Simpson approached him smiling and offering his hand. Dunne says he declined to shake hands but notes that Simpson despite all the revelations about him still possessed an almost irresistible charm.

Dunne is at his best when revealing the personalities and social backgrounds of the principals who confront each other in the courtroom. A dogged gatherer of facts and gossip, he always seems to know the right people insiders he bumps into at elegant parties who have tantalizing information to share about the trial in question. He makes no pretense of being objective, freely coloring his accounts with his own impressions and biases. He is contemptuous of Judge Lance Ito in the first Simpson trial, less than dazzled by prosecuting attorney Marcia Clark, but quite taken with police detective Mark Fuhrman.

Socially privileged himself, Dunne brings an insider’s perspective to his coverage of the trials of the well-to-do that few other crime reporters can hope to match. Always perceptive, ever engaging, with Justice, Dunne has done it again.

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

Timothy Dumas, former managing editor of Greentown News, is obsessed with the most infamous murder mystery to occur in America’s wealthiest community, Greenwich, Connecticut. For years, Dumas has written about the headline-grabbing slaying of 15-year-old Martha Moxley, found beaten to death on the lawn of her home on Halloween, 1975. Now, with Greentown, Dumas offers one final examination of the case.

The brutal murder of the young all-American beauty, as chronicled by Dumas, begins with a no-holds-barred overview of Ground Zero, the remote Belle Haven community of Greenwich, nicknamed “Greentown,” a place where nothing is as it seems. Something evil and decadent lurks in the rows of gabled mansions along the tree-lined streets in the monied enclave, home of the nation’s tony jet set, Hollywood royalty, and political power brokers. Dumas shatters the myth of this suburban Shangri-La with his probing, uncompromising look at the girl’s last hours and the crime’s aftermath. However, it is the author’s crisp, lean writing style that lends the work its power. Dumas’s relentless search does not prevent him from finding the underlying humanity of the principals in this sordid event. The author ventures bravely into the minds of each of the key players, using their individual voices to weave a colorful tapestry of grief, deception, and hypocrisy. The writer is at his best when he allows them to speak their deepest fears and secrets. Some elements of the case surfaced immediately police disclosed that the murder weapon was a woman’s golf club and that the last person to see the dead girl was Thomas Skekel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy. Others, however, remain a mystery. With the complete revelation of the grisly murder, the Belle Haven community, long protective of its reputation and distrustful of outsiders, closed ranks, stymying the police investigation. Every lead rushed to a frustrating dead end, witnesses suddenly became strangely mute, suspects were captured and quickly released.

To his credit, Dumas veers away from the type of doting fascination with the rich and famous that writer Dominick Dunne exhibited in his popular A Season in Purgatory, which is also based on the Moxley case. Instead, Dumas focuses his attention on the seemingly ill-fitting puzzle pieces of the unsolved murder. Why would a killer choose the carefree, fun-loving Moxley teen for such a gruesome death? Why was the clumsy six-iron used as a murder weapon? How did a stranger get past the defenses of the heavily guarded Belle Haven community? Was it an inside job? In short, Dumas’s Greentown is the perfect example of what a treasure trove of research can become in the hands of a capable writer.

Reviewed by Robert Fleming.

A title wave of beach paperbacks Whether you’re contemplating a trip to an exotic beach, or planning to spend the warm weather months in the back yard, you’ll want to bring along that most necessary of seasonal accouterments. No, not sunscreen. We’re talking summer reading. Especially the easy-to-tote paperback variety. A hardcover sensation, John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story, literally spent years on bestseller lists. This month the 1994 title at last debuts in soft cover. Never mind that Clint Eastwood’s movie version has come and gone. If you haven’t read this account of life and death and murder Savannah-style, replete with its parade of beguiling eccentrics, you’re in for a mint-julep-flavored treat. Southern accents and sensibilities also abound in Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (HarperCollins, $14, 0060928336). Flashing back and forth from the 1990s to the 1960s, the book explores Siddalee’s efforts to understand her seemingly incomprehensible mother, the Louisiana magnolia Viviane, and her three chums. Booted out of a Shirley Temple lookalike contest when they were just six, the girls spent their college years blazing a bourbon-splattered trail, buffered by the motto (from a Billie Holiday tune), smoke, drink, don’t think. As much a paean to sisterhood as it is a mother-daughter tale, Ya-Ya is a kind of follow-up to Wells’s much darker first novel, Little Altars Everywhere, (HarperCollins, $13, 0060976845), and is being developed for a movie by Bette Midler’s production company. Yet another girly story is recounted in Bridget Jones’s Diary (Penguin, $12.95, 014028009X). Helen Fielding’s book which originated as a column in a London newspaper is the first-person odyssey of the thirtysomething Bridget, who is obsessed with such ’90s issues as learning to program her VCR, finding Mr. Right, and, of course, weight loss (in one year she manages to lose 72 pounds . . . and to gain 74). The producers of the quirky Four Weddings and a Funeral plan a movie version of the quirky Bridget.

Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel, by first-time novelist Arthur S. Golden, may also be headed for the screen with Steven Spielberg’s involvement. For now, enjoy it in print (Vintage, $14, 0679781587), as the geisha Sayuri details her metamorphosis from peasant child she was nine when her widowed father sold her to a geisha house to her prewar rise as a leading geisha and on to her role as mistress to a power-broker. Golden spent nine years researching and writing this intricately detailed saga, which takes us on a memorable, eye-opening journey.

And last but not least, we mustn’t forget Margaret Mitchell’s monumental (and perennially best-selling) classic, Gone with the Wind (Warner Books, $7.99, 0446365386).

Hollywood journalist Pat H. Broeske is also a biographer who has chronicled the lives of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley.

The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime As a former literary editor for Outside magazine, author Miles Harvey knows a thing or two about the importance of maps when it comes to defining a subject. But in 1995 when he came across the true story in the Chicago Tribune of Gilbert Joseph Bland, Jr., a contemporary map thief whose cartographic crime spree made him the most famous such bandit in American history, Harvey was more than intrigued. So, as any adventurer is apt to do, he set off down the uncharted trail of this “Al Capone of cartography” to learn why a South Florida antiques dealer would become master map thief. What began as a lengthy feature article for Outside turned into four years of researching the methods and motives of his enigmatic subject, thus The Island Of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime became a readable chart of these unusual crimes and the man behind them.

Visualize if you will a contemporary map thief. Beyond generating an image of a tweedy, nondescript, and somewhat less gadgetry-enhanced version of James Bond, it’s more of a challenge to imagine why someone would habitually pilfer hundreds of old maps from prominent research libraries across Canada and the United States. In his investigations, Harvey descends into the intriguing subculture of map collectors and experts and the peripheral eccentrics who encountered Bland as he slipped undetected through the doors of various libraries with centuries-old maps of all kinds hidden on his person. Most interesting are the many obscure side trips Harvey makes during his trail of investigations which, written in highly descriptive and well-paced prose, create the mood of a dimly lit library during a thunderstorm. As we learn with each incident involving maps Harvey encounters, behind every map is a significant story. The story behind the greatest map thief in America is an entertaining adventure in history, humanity, and the fascinating role cartography plays in it all. Jamie McAlister writes from his home in Charleston, South Carolina.

Though it will probably be shelved in the True Crime section, Disco Bloodbath is only ostensibly about ultrahip New York party promoter Michael Alig’s 1996 co-murder and dismemberment of his drug dealer. The gruesome act and Alig’s subsequent imprisonment bookends what is really more of a fascinating memoir by St. James, an Alig friend/foe and well-known gadfly on the city’s predominately homosexual nightclub circuit.

Chronicling the scene and all its excesses between the demise of Warhol and the rise of the Club Kids, St. James is the catty tour guide to a Felliniesque netherworld. In it, days are spent deciding which outrageous way to dress or dye your hair for the evening’s activities, Special K is a designer drug and not a breakfast cereal, and the after-party entertainment just might include a middle-aged drag queen pulling fully lit Christmas bulbs out of his (or her) anus. St. James is the epitome of the literary convention known as the unreliable narrator. His recollections (amazing that he even has them, since he admits to being drugged up during much of the period) are filled with subjectivity, petty and pithy personality shredding, and yes a flamboyant queenly bitchiness accentuated by the hefty usage of bold, italic, and all-caps typefaces. But rather than off-putting, this is actually the book’s biggest strength, as St. James’s inimitable voice in full Diva mode rings through loud and clear even if it is a bit shrill at times.

Along the way he introduces many true-life and pathetic (but unforgettable) characters, happy when they’ve schmoozed successfully or gotten a mention in The Village Voice, but desolate when their supply of coke and the latest boy toy have run out, sometimes simultaneously.

So while the title might bring to mind a bad ’70s drive-in flick and no literal carnage takes place on the dance floor populated by has-beens, wannabes, and never-wases, Disco Bloodbath is a journey into a land of strange creatures with bizarre manners. Hmm, maybe they could also put a few copies in the Science Fiction section.

Bob Ruggiero is a freelance entertainment journalist based in Houston.