By Tom Nolan

When first we meet the title character of Ron Currie's superb "The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne," it's 1968 and 14-year-old Babs, of Waterville, Maine, is grieving her soldier brother's recent death in Vietnam. Waterville is a mill town, deeply corrupt and oddly proud of the fact. But Babs -- born Barbara, though few call her that -- is fed up and angry with the powers that be. Her smart mouth brings her the ire of a thieving, violent policeman; after he assaults her, she stabs him to death with her late sibling's paratrooper knife. A priest from her Franco-American community whisks her to sanctuary in a Vermont nunnery. When she returns, five years later, it's to assume leadership of her old Little Canada neighborhood's drug gang.

By 2016, the year of most of the book's action, "everyone had more trouble than money." But the Dionne crew's OxyContin trade is thriving -- so much so that it draws the threatening attention of a heroin lord whose business is suffering. Into Waterville cruises a creepy enforcer known only as The Man: "elemental, amoral, impervious to reasoning . . . . He was the fifth late notice on a long-overdue bill. . . . He was the evaporation of the future you'd imagined." The Man's bizarre back story is one of several astonishing set pieces that elevate this novel to brilliance.

There are several other problems facing Babs. Her daughter Lori, a drug-addicted veteran of the Afghanistan war, is urging her to go straight. Her other daughter Celeste (called Sis) hasn't been home in days. And Sis's alcoholic husband, Bruce, has misappropriated a pharmaceutical shipment meant for the local pill mill. There's also a raging forest fire bearing down on Waterville. As one of Babs's Little Canada henchwomen says: "It feels . . . what's the word?" Another answers: " Apocalyptique." All this is shadowed by Babs's advancing Huntington's disease, which she keeps secret from family and crew. Mr. Currie, himself a Maine resident of Franco-American descent, is a blazing talent who writes with style and a keen sense of history.

The prolific author John Sandford writes separate series books about two different Minnesota lawmen. Lucas Davenport, a former homicide detective, is now a deputy U.S. Marshal in the Twin Cities; Virgil Flowers works as an investigator for the state's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. The two join forces (not for the first time) in "Lethal Prey," this time to solve the 22-year-old murder of a St. Paul accounting-firm clerk whose ailing twin sister has offered a $5 million reward for the killer's identity. "It sounds interesting," admits a prone-to-boredom Lucas. "For a while, anyway."

In fact, it proves to be the professional change of pace he's been craving: "What he really wanted was to chase down serious, intelligent, violent criminals instead of the dirtballs he'd been pursuing over the last year." Whoever slaughtered Doris Grandfelt was as serious and violent as a psychopath -- and intelligent enough to elude capture for more than two decades. Virgil, though, is of two minds about this assignment. He's taken up the profession of writing thrillers and faces the deadline for his fourth novel, a "make-or-break" book. But both detectives are committed to the case by the time that huge reward turns the endeavor into an internet sensation.

Lucas and Virgil are soon being tailed and documented by a gaggle of true-crime bloggers, one of whom finds a piece of valuable evidence. The detectives make common cause with the most responsible citizen-journalists, getting them (with the promise of a share of the reward) to crowdsource enormous research tasks the cops would need months to accomplish. Meanwhile, readers are privy to the machinations of the killer, who follows the lawmen's activities via the media and plans some treacherous defensive measures. "Lethal Prey" is a superlative police procedural paired with an outrageous serial-killer saga, enlivened by an array of quirky characters.

One might say every cryptic poem written by Emily Dickinson was a small mystery to be solved. "I Died for Beauty," Amanda Flower's third detective novel involving the 19th-century Bard of Amherst, Mass., once more sets her fictional version of Emily the task of investigating a murder: the death of a working-class couple killed in a purposely set house fire. Willa Noble, the Dickinson household's unmarried "second maid" -- and a confidant of the unconventional Emily -- accompanies her mistress to the scene of the crime and observes her inspecting its scorched rubble "as if she were Dupin in Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue."

In this cruel crime perpetrated in the freezing winter of 1857, rocks were piled at the front and back doors of the victims' home to prevent their escape. Poignantly, the couple's 8-year-old daughter survived; she forms an instant attachment to Willa, who vows to be her protector. Who killed the child's parents? Willa's policeman boyfriend assembles clues and suspects, but his superiors refuse to sanction his investigation. The male victim was employed at Amherst College, where Emily's father is the treasurer; the image-conscious college people prefer the conflagration be treated as an accident.

Moving at a leisurely pace, "I Died for Beauty" proves rich with sharp insights into its time and place. Willa is ever on guard lest she violate social etiquette: "Emily had given me permission to call her by her Christian name, but I remained careful that I didn't abuse that privilege... . Young women like me had been dismissed for much less." Emily is candid regarding the frustrations of writing poetry, which seem not unlike the vexations of crime-solving: "I sense something is amiss, but it's just out of reach. . . . I feel that I am on the cusp of discovery, but the words . . . elude me." This sweetly satisfying story not only brings its villains to proper account and protects its most vulnerable characters but also allows its dual protagonists to resolve the puzzles of their separate future fates. (The clues were there all along.)

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April 04, 2025 10:21 ET (14:21 GMT)

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