Cops with Machisma

By John Skow

Reading crime novels in mixed company, now that some of the toughest and raunchiest fictional cops, detectives and villains are women, has become a delicate exercise in sexual politics. We can imagine Spenser, Robert B. Parker's tough-guy hero, paging through a thriller one evening, log fire burning and six-pack of Sam Adams at the ready, when his girlfriend Susan Silverman senses trouble. She speaks: "You're looking all choked up and strange, Slugger." He explains sheepishly that he is reading a detective story. "Yes ... ?" "Well, so there's this wounded guy, and suddenly the detective whips off, um, her panty hose and makes a tourniquet to stop the bleeding." Spenser's consort, the reader supposes, suggests Agatha Christie and counseling.

The truth is, however, that the era of "English cozies" -- the ladylike, death-stalks-the-vicarage sort of teacup rattler that grannies used to write and read -- is mostly over and widely unmourned. Nor is it necessary these days for women who want to write about the darkest crimes -- P.D. James comes to mind -- to confect not-quite-believable male investigators. It's not a surprise that among the grittiest of this season's crime novels are three written by and about women.

The grimmest and most convincing is Patricia Cornwell's The Body Farm (Scribners; 387 pages; $23), the fifth adventure of Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a gifted forensic pathologist, which means, yes, a performer of autopsies. And a fast hand with panty hose; it's she who tends to the wounded fellow, who as it happens is her married lover.

The title refers to a research unit where the decomposition of bodies is studied. Scarpetta uses its grisly expertise to track a serial killer whose latest victim is an 11-year-old girl. What she finds is chilling, unexpected and nearly fatal. The author uses the momentum that a good series develops: an evil presence from an earlier book lurks in the background, and Scarpetta's love affair foreshadows trouble in Book Six. In the messy present, a running squabble with a neurotic, self-absorbed sister is fine family comedy.

! A cleverly built foundation underlies Mallory's Oracle (Putnam; 286 pages; $21.95), by newcomer Carol O'Connell; the author relates that her flamboyant main character, a young cop named Kathleen Mallory, was a Manhattan street kid into her early teens. The experience left her a borderline sociopath, and since she is both gorgeous and unusually bright, she can cause a lot of trouble. Her beloved adoptive uncle, an old police lieutenant, is murdered as the novel begins. She undertakes a lone-wolf investigation, having been forbidden to do so, and wanders like a gun-packing Alice into a mirror world of characters as clever and without conscience as she. A coven of rich, carnivorous old ladies is both scammed upon and scamming, but can its doddering members really have anything to do with a series of ferocious murders? How much should Mallory trust the male character who seems to have been modeled on Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock's smarter brother? O'Connell's fairy tale is wild-eyed nonsense and good fun.

Perhaps this spark of crazy irresponsibility is what is missing from North of Montana (Knopf; 293 pages; $23), by another promising first novelist, April Smith. The problem may be that Ana Grey, the main character, is a female FBI agent, and an unshakeable convention of crime fiction is that the FBI is inept, dull and pompous. A subplot in which a sexist boss blocks Grey's promotion is believable, though it doesn't do much to enliven the bureau's reputation for white-shirt-blue-tie tedium. Cop novels can plod occasionally, but this one, set in Los Angeles (Montana is a street, not the state), moves along well enough, in deliberate fashion, to sort out the intricacies of a Hollywood star's abundant drug supply. And to uncover a family mystery: why Grey's grandfather, an old cop who is dying of cancer, is so evasive about the father she never knew.

Smith is a solid, workmanlike writer, though her thriller has been hyped so relentlessly that readers who have encountered this blather storm will wonder whether somebody got titles mixed up at the printer's. A person-to-person endorsement would read something like, "This is pretty good; you might like it."