CRIMINAL PURSUITS

Grief, so well-described that it sets up disturbing resonances in the reader, is rare in most crime fiction. Escapism and the comforting thought that even violent death is make-believe and pain-free, is the norm. But in T. Jefferson Parker’s Pacific Beat (St. Martin’s: $18.95; 364 pp.), the grief felt by a murdered woman’s husband and brother is almost palpable. The emotional impact is seen to be inconceivable, then numbing, then disorienting, then enraging.

In his third novel (after “Laguna Heat” and “Little Saigon”), Parker is again thoroughly at home along the Orange County littoral, the unchic bars (where the dead woman was a waitress), the ocean where the divers find both tranquillity and excitement, the daily world where, among other ethnicities, Hispanic and Anglo make their tentative accommodations.

Husband is a Latino police officer, brother-in-law is a professional diver. There are subplots, one involving anger over the chemical polluting of the ocean. But at its heart, the story is of revenge and the untangling of threads of causation winding into a sad past. Parker is more sure-handed each time.

Nothing I’ve read in some time has so evoked the noir power of Cornell Woolrich and Jim Thompson at their blackest as Ray Ring’s Arizona Kiss (Little, Brown: $17.95; 208 pp.).

Ring, a former Arizona newspaperman, does a first-person portrayal of a ruthlessly ambitious investigative reporter on the trail to a Pulitzer and thus, in his judgment, to fame and riches. He is first seen impersonating a hard-rock miner to expose unsafe conditions. His scoop imperils the life of his informant, but he gets the story.

Then a gorgeous dame (this is noir , remember) comes bearing an expose of a local judge who illegally breeds and fights pit bulls. Too late--much too late--the reporter fills in the back story on the lady and the judge. It is all as economical as a telegram, and the Arizona landscape never has seemed more surreal, menacing and, in a terrible way, beautiful. The ending is a genuine, 180-proof gasper.

Mary Higgins Clark’s latest suspense thriller, Loves Music, Loves to Dance (Simon & Schuster: $19.95; 319 pp.) was atop the best-seller lists even before its official publication date. Over eight previous books (one of them short stories), she has won a loyal readership as a clever plotter and a swift and efficient storyteller who works the up-market side of society and induces no emotional traumas in the readers.

She satisfies--in this instance with a belief-stretching tale of a serial killer who lures pretty women with fetchingly worded personal ads on the theme of the book’s title, then does them in to avenge a snub from his high school years that left him with a split personality. A whale-sized crimson herring keeps things boiling, and despite the nastinesses, realism is held at bay.

Elizabeth George lives in Huntington Beach, but in the authentic detailing of her British settings she out-Grimes Martha Grimes and could as easily be a London neighbor of P. D. James, whom she resembles in the emotional and eventful complexity of her books.

Her latest, A Suitable Vengeance (Bantam: $19; 371 pp.), observes the great tradition of assembling an ill-assorted cast of characters for a long and deadly weekend at a country house. But Agatha Christie is distinctly not hiding in the wings.

The host, a Scotland Yard inspector who’s also an earl, brings his fiancee to a snarled family history, including a wastrel kid brother far gone in drugs. The sister of a friendly forensics specialist is nuts for another addict. A local journalist, thought to be a swinger, is murdered and mutilated. Jealousy, or was he onto a sensitive story?

There are London connections, any number of suspects and motivations and, not so incidentally, a close following of some tormented relationships. George’s hero is refreshingly flawed and even rendered myopic by various emotions. P. D. James has a polished literary eloquence all her own, but George provides the same kind of sumptuous, all-out reading experience.

J. C. Pollock writes in the tradition of Tom Clancy and Jack Higgins, among others, providing so much specific information about military and intelligence operations that the details, more than plot or character, become the chief fascination of the book. In Threat Case (Delacorte: $20; 309 pp.), the lore about a whole alphabet soup of U.S. intelligence agencies, which only begin s with the CIA, is boggling. It is also intended, Pollock leaves no doubt, to reassure us that we are in good hands.

His hero, Jack Gannon, a Vietnam vet with Delta Force associations, has two sets of personal reasons for tracking down an ex-CIA assassin, from the days when the Agency did that sort of thing, who has now been engaged by a cabal of South American drug lords to gun down the President on a New York street.

An embittered ex-CIA man has done his best to prove the assassin long dead. (Both were let go when Jimmy Carter trimmed the Agency’s sails.) But Gannon finds him very much alive and there begins a tense chase, intercut among pursuers, pursued and victim, around and about the Cafe Carlyle, with Bobby Short (unnamed) playing for the customers inside.

There are echoes of Frederick Forsyth’s “The Day of the Jackal.” But if you’ve read of one attempted assassination, you haven’t read of them all. Here the book is the more interesting for being so coolly written, like a case history from which the more unraveled emotions have been trimmed.

Faye Kellerman’s Day of Atonement (William Morrow: $20; 346 pp.) begins with dangerous deliberateness. Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, lately married, have gone back to Brooklyn to meet her family. For what seem like endless pages, the conversation is about Judaism, Reform versus Orthodox, degrees of observance, with Decker, though Jewish, beginning to feel like the odd man out.

Then again, there are glimpses of a nut case who loves gutting fish and has a collection of razor-sharp knives. He has, it becomes evident, taken off with a teen-ager, Rina’s sullen and rebellious nephew, as his willing hostage.

Kellerman’s (and the reader’s) patience pays off. The race to discover who the nut case is and where the pair have gone before the boy becomes victim instead of accomplice is tautly exciting. And there is a vicious confrontation, with sufficient moral ambiguity to tease any rabbinical scholar, in the muck beneath the unfinished Century Freeway.

Andrew Vachss is just about the toughest of contemporary crime novelists, a New York lawyer specializing in juvenile-justice cases, who exposes his knowledge of the world’s darkest side, and his rage at it, in novels that are not so much narratives as fragments of a mosaic of evil. (The present book has 195 fragments, some only a sentence long.) Sacrifice (Alfred A. Knopf: $20; 255 pp.) is Vachss’ sixth tale of the horrors wrought upon children. This time his ex-con protagonist Burke is trying to help a child so badly abused that he has taken temporary refuge in a second, murderous personality who, or which, has murdered a baby but has no memory of it.

Burke has a circle of helpers that somewhat resembles the gangs who used to abet Doc Savage and the Shadow, including a deaf and speechless Chinese of enormous speed and stealth, a chap called The Prof who speaks in rap, a woman who runs a Chinese restaurant and hates all customers except Burke and his pals, assorted Jamaicans and others. He is haunted by all the friends, including many women, he has lost violently in earlier books.

The combination of pulpish devices and empurpled rhetoric occasionally comes close to defeating Vachss’ intentions. “This isn’t a city. It’s a halfway house without a roof. Stressed to critical mass. . . . Fear rules. Politicians promise the people an army of blue-coated street-sweepers for a jungle no chemical could defoliate. . . . The walls of some buildings still tremble with the molecular memory of baby-bashing violence and incestuous terror.”

Yet despite the stressful writing, Vachss waves a powerful light across a city landscape that few writers go near, and none portray so convincingly. It is unpleasant, but it is also mesmerizing in its intensity.