Complicated capers

The Vanished Hands

Robert Wilson

Harcourt: 368 pp., $25

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The Motive

John Lescroart

Dutton: 418 pp., $25.95

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Alone

Lisa Gardner

Bantam: 346 pp., $24

*

Robert WILSON’s thrillers are unusually highbrow for the genre and none the worse for it. Their velocity never falters; nor does the sagacity of his sleuths. Or their loquacity. In “The Vanished Hands,” this time it’s summer in Seville: The streets are thick with heat, the indoors chilly with air conditioning for those who can afford it.

Chief Inspector Javier Falcon of the city police investigates first one suspect death, then more of the same, each extinction apparently unconnected, yet a precursor to the next. Before too long, his inklings shape a cat’s cradle of unsavory doings that complicate his quest and aggravate suspense. Is he dealing with inexplicable suicides or enigmatic murders? Is he pursuing pedophiles and white slavers, Russian Mafiosi, agents or cat’s-paws of the CIA, relicts of the bad old days of Gen. Pinochet in Chile or all of the above?

What starts as a police procedural turns into psychoplottiness peppered with guilt, resentment, romance and the allure of sexual adventure spiced by political and moralistic allusions to underground American activities. Falcon and other characters are having weird, unsettling dreams. Mortality among household pets is rising. And all the while, August draws nearer, with every other wit or suspect away on holiday and police short-staffed for the same reason.

Undeterred, Falcon toughs it out on a tide of cafe solos and semi-frustrating flirtations, to finally score a semi-satisfying success. Tangly, sprawly, garrulous, astute, here’s one more Wilson witchery that intertwines literature, art and heavy doses of bafflement.

In John Lescroart’s “The Motive,” arson provides the origin and impulse of a convoluted caper. A fire destroys a prominent attorney’s home in a gentrified section of San Francisco, leaving only charred debris and the unrecognizable remains of a man and a woman. A murder-suicide? Or double homicide?

Investigators soon tie the remains to the attorney Paul Hanover and to Missy d’Amiens, the mistress he was about to marry. Fast-moving police inquiries lead to the arrest and trial of Catherine Hanover, Paul’s daughter-in-law and one of numerous Hanover heirs whose interests his marriage would adversely affect.

But neither Deputy Chief of Police Abe Glitsky nor his friend Dismas Hardy, the lawyer induced to defend Catherine, are satisfied with the case built by a hot-dogging homicide inspector, Dan Cuneo. Stubborn investigative work by Glitsky and Hardy will get the charges against Catherine dismissed and spring a string of booby-trap surprises en route to an egregious conclusion.

Lescroart piles up the complications. Detectives work in mistrustful antiphony. Their search is roiled by the financial shenanigans that go along with the awarding of lucrative city contracts. There’s a will whose disposition may provide the crucial motive of the crime. There’s the greedy, resentful Hanover family; a primary suspect who does little to help herself or her lawyer; a cop, Cuneo, twisted worse than tortellini; and there are charges of sexual harassment all pockmarked by the distractions of everyday private life.

Lescroart’s tangled scenario is astutely laid out, his stagecraft is enticing, his dodges are artful, his trial scenes ensnaring, making “The Motive” a captivating read.

Lisa Gardner’s “Alone” is about kidnapping, rape, incest, murder, dark family secrets and soiled memories. It is winter in Boston. An armed suspect threatening a woman and child is blown away by a police sniper, and turmoil hits the fan.

The shooter, Bobby Dakota of the Massachusetts State Police SWAT team, faces the loss of his gun and job pending resolution of a wrongful-death lawsuit and now must clear himself and take back his life.

Jimmy Gagnon, the dead aggressor recast as a victim, was the son of a judge and the scion of a rich, powerful clan. His family sets out to establish that the mercurial Jimmy was no threat to anyone until cornered and rubbed out by police. As the Gagnons sue Dakota for murder, he is pursued by their hired help and, worse, by Richard Umbrio, a ruthless predator released from jail at the behest of Judge Gagnon. Dakota weaves and ducks through thickets of danger, until the explosive climax when Umbrio is finished off along with the miscreant judge.

Intricate and suspenseful, “Alone” keeps you on the edge of your seat without a moment’s respite. But a large hunk of its plot hinges on Dakota, who blew a man’s head to bits while doing his job, trying and failing to get over that searing experience. Gardner might consider that many over the past centuries have shot at fellow humans and lost no sleep when they hit their target. True, that was mostly in war. But aren’t the police, much like Bobby Dakota, also at war to defend us? *