New in crime fiction: dark doings from Hong Kong to Seoul to rural Idaho

Crime fiction |

Hong Kong, Seoul, London and a fictional county in rural Idaho — if this month's mystery and crime selection is to be believed, evil lurks in the hearts of them all.

Harry Bosch, the LAPD detective who is the steel spine of Michael Connelly's nonpareil series, ventures far from his comfort zone in the compulsively readable "9 Dragons" (Little, Brown, 374 pp., $27.99). The shooting death of a Chinese store owner in Los Angeles blossoms into an investigation of that city's deeply embedded tongs — crudely put, the Chinese Mafia.

As Harry moves closer, his daughter — who lives in Hong Kong with his ex-wife — is kidnapped. Bosch catapults himself into a frenzied search through Kowloon's scary byways (the book's title is a translation of that city's name). Harry is relentless but usually compassionate (toward good people, anyway), and his mission ends in both tragedy and an elusive hint of redemption.

What do pagan gods have in common with the Beatles, martyred saints, a headless body, an adorable white witch, some guy disguised as a stag (complete with knives for antlers) and the most esoteric information about London you can imagine? Well, let's start with their shared presence in "Bryant & May on the Loose" (Bantam, 337 pp., $25).

Arthur Bryant and John May are the oldest detectives in London and the stars of Christopher Fowler's eclectic, eccentric and endlessly entertaining books about the city's Peculiar Crimes Unit. (The adjective refers to oddball crimes the regular cops can't handle, but it applies equally well to the unit itself.) Despite their team's threatened demise, the detectives tackle their latest interlocking puzzles with gleeful energy and savvy — as well as a keen interest in even the strangest of detecting methods.

Let's head down to Dave's House of Fry for a hearty meal and a mystery with Bo Tully, the sheriff of Blight County, Idaho. Bo's a no-nonsense kind of guy (even though he does indulge in $3,000 alligator cowboy boots and the shameless ogling of pretty women). The sheriff finds himself hip-deep in dark waters in Spokane writer Patrick F. McManus' "The Double-Jack Murders" (Simon & Schuster, 228 pp., $24).

A couple of old dears prevail on Bo to investigate the decades-old disappearance of two miners, and in the meantime an unstable killer is out to get the sheriff. Bo heads into the mountains with his hellzapoppin' father and their pal Dave, hoping to lure the killer while digging into the other case. McManus' prose is sure-footed, Bo is bemused and the denizens of Blight County are delightfully cracked.

"G.I. Bones" (Soho, 336 pp., $24) is the latest from Lynnwood writer Martin Limón in his reliable and robust series about Ernie Bascom and George Sueño, two U.S. military cops in 1970s Korea. Nobody navigates the barely controlled chaos of Seoul's red-light district like these two — or the byzantine ways of Army bureaucracy, for that matter. Limón's empathy for Korean culture, meanwhile, makes him an excellent guide.

Here, a fortuneteller asks the two to find a missing-and-presumed-dead G.I. whose ghost, she says, is haunting her. Their investigation leads to a chilling case involving government corruption; a group of nuns and their orphan charges; and some very frightening Korean gangsters. A subplot about the wayward daughter of an Army big shot adds spice to the stew.

I'm sad to report the death at 75 last month of Stuart Kaminsky, a Grandmaster of the Mystery Writers of America and the prolific author of, among many others, the superb Inspector Rostnikov and Lew Fonseca novels. The writer and his books will be missed.

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