Scene of the Crime: This month's mystery selections

Happy New Year! Let's ring in 2009 with crime fiction about a missing woman, an outrageous hitman-turned-doctor, a wisecracking secretary and a faked Old Master.

It takes a lot of chutzpah for a book reviewer to write books of her own, especially under her own name. But Hallie Ephron, the crime-fiction columnist for The Boston Globe, can hold her head high: She does it, and very well, too. Ephron's latest, "Never Tell a Lie" (Morrow, 289 pp., $24.95) is a snaky, unsettling tale of psychological suspense.

David and Ivy, high-school sweethearts, are now a married suburban couple. They have a nice house and a comfortable standard of living, and Ivy's finally pregnant after many attempts. But things begin to go very wrong for them when an old high-school acquaintance shows up at their garage sale.

Melinda, a distinctly odd duck, asserts that they were all much better friends back in the day than they really were. She asks to see the inside of the couple's beautiful Victorian house — and never comes out. Naturally, Melinda's bizarre disappearance attracts the attention of the police. The cops begin to suspect David has been having an affair with the missing woman — and that he may know more about the vanished woman than he lets on.

Peter Brown is a New York City emergency-room physician with an unusual background. He used to be Pietro "Bearclaw" Brnwa, a professional killer for organized crime. Peter is the narrator of Josh Bazell's unpredictable, funny, and sometimes heartbreaking "Beat the Reaper" (Little, Brown, 320 pp., $24.95).

Now in the Witness Protection Program, the quick-thinking and foul-mouthed doc is (like medical residents everywhere) being run ragged, busily saving lives instead of taking them. But then a mobbed-up patient recognizes him, and Peter's off on a mad dash for safety. His once-best friend, a guy Peter thought was dead, is bent on a terrible vengeance. The intense chase includes a couple of deliriously over-the-top climaxes, involving (in one case) a shark tank and Peter's girlfriend and (in the other) a surprising use for one's own leg bone.

Bazell provides (mostly in hilarious footnotes) a barrage of medical trivia, snarky asides and insider knowledge explaining why you really don't want a lengthy hospital stay. The author's a resident at UC San Francisco, so he knows whereof he speaks. "Beat the Reaper" thus reads like a version of chef Anthony Bourdain's scandalous "Kitchen Confidential," only with stethoscopes and guns.

"Death Was In the Picture" (Thomas Dunne, 288 pp., $24.95) is the second book in a snappy series from Vancouver Island writer and editor Linda L. Richards. It's set in Depression-era L.A., and our heroine is hard-boiled Kitty Pangborn, secretary to hard-drinking private eye Dexter Theroux.

Movie star Laird Wyndham is the last person to have seen a murdered ingénue alive. Some rather shady characters are paying Theroux and his loyal companion big bucks to track the star through darkest Hollywood, with an eye toward exonerating him. Nice period detail, Kitty's tart voice and a satisfyingly twisty ending more than make up for the occasional straining of credulity.

Londoner Ruth Brandon is a distinguished biographer of, among others, Harry Houdini. Her assured "Caravaggio's Angel" (Soho, 272 pp., $25) marks the debut of Dr. Reggie Lee, an art curator and historian at London's National Gallery.

In this erudite and informative thriller, Lee is planning a show around the three known versions of Caravaggio's 1605 painting "St. Cecilia and the Angels." She successfully locates two, but is unable to secure the loan of the third — and then a fourth version shows up. One is certainly a fake.

Then the Italian-paintings expert at the Louvre is killed. He's the one who's been blocking the third painting's loan, for unknown reasons. Lee's dogged search for the solution to the mystery leads her to other deaths, intrigue dating from earlier in the last century, deep family ties — and danger for herself.

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