"Touchstone" | A thriller with a human polygraph

Laurie R. King is best known for her delightful series starring Mary Russell, the woman Sherlock Holmes apparently married in his retirement. But King is also adept at writing intelligent, nuanced stand-alone thrillers. Case in point: "Touchstone" (Bantam, 548 pp., $24).

We're between the world wars, and Harris Stuyvesant is an agent of the Bureau of Investigation (the FBI's precursor). His hunt for an anarchistic bomber has brought him to England — and to the charismatic Bennett Grey, whose war injury has left him with an unusual power. Grey's ability, which is both a blessing and a curse: He knows, unerringly, if people are telling the truth.

This double-edged "gift" has made Grey hypersensitive to social contact, and he has secluded himself in rural Cornwall. Nonetheless, Stuyvesant befriends the wary recluse — he needs Grey's help to infiltrate an eccentric, aristocratic family with ties to the bomber. "Touchstone" has indelible characters, a palpable sense of a volatile time and place, and a plot as tight as a drum. What more could you want?

Turner — ex-con, ex-soldier and ex-therapist turned sheriff — is lounging on the main street of his nameless Tennessee town, philosophizing with the local doctor, when the former sheriff's bad-boy son speeds down the street and crashes a car smack into the front of City Hall. Hell of a note, and that's just the beginning of Turner's troubles in "Salt River" (Walker, 146 pp., $21.95), the third of James Sallis' elegiac books about the man.

Sallis is a gifted polymath: poet, biographer, translator, essayist, musician and prolific (if criminally neglected) novelist. His Turner books are little gems, with their sharp descriptions and melancholy reflections. Here, for instance, is the book's opening line, an observation once made by Turner's dead and much-mourned true love: "Sometimes you just have to see how much music you can make with what you have left."

For something really snappy — a dandy, old-school hard-boiled detective story, told from the point of view of a tough PI's equally tough secretary — go no further than Linda L. Richards' "Death Was the Other Woman" (St. Martin's Minotaur, 261 pp., $23.95).

Richards, who lives in B.C.'s Gulf Islands, has given her book the evocative setting of Depression-era L.A. Kitty Pangborn, a rich girl fallen on hard times, works for Dexter Theroux, private eye and two-fisted drinker. Dex is hired by some rich guy's hot-cha-cha mistress to tail her lover, and (as these things so often happen) Lover Boy soon gets himself dead. Then the corpse disappears and things start getting really wild, taking our narrator — the clear-eyed, very funny Kitty — up to San Francisco and back in search of the truth.

"An Ordinary Spy" (Bloomsbury, 278 pp., $23.95) is an audacious spy novel from a young former CIA officer, Joseph Weisberg. Mark Ruttenberg is a rookie CIA man who fumbles his first assignment and is sent home in disgrace. There he's put in contact with another dishonored spy, Bobby Goldstein, and Goldstein tells Ruttenberg his own story. This tale, about a hapless attempt to recruit an informant, forms the bulk of the book.

What gives "An Ordinary Spy" its offbeat kick is that much of it is redacted — that is, blacked out, in the manner of such nonfiction books as the recent memoir by outed spy Valerie Plame. As a result, virtually all of the novel's identifying descriptions (including such basics as location) have been excised.

Author Weisberg would have us believe that this is genuine censorship by the CIA. Or is this explanation just a clever double blind, covering a way for him to flex some writerly muscles? Either way, it's a testament to Weisberg's skill that he grips the reader throughout, despite the lack of description — and the annoyance factor of all those black lines, which sometimes reaches Code Red level.

Seattle writer Adam Woog's column on mystery and crime fiction appears on the second Sunday of the month in The Times.