New York Review of Books Review

It doesn't take a terrorist, a serial killer or some paranormal force to rattle the insular Norwegian communities Karin Fossum writes about in her quietly unnerving thrillers. In BLACK SECONDS (Harcourt, $24), all it takes is the disappearance of a child. Granted, this is no ordinary kiddie - 9-year-old Ida Joner is so "sweet and enchanting" she's "like a child in a fairy tale." Everyone in the village of Glassverket loves Ida, but none more than her mother, who idolizes her golden girl. A sad, fatalistic woman, Helga Joner has always felt that Ida was "just too good to be true. ... Too good to last," and when Ida vanishes after setting off on her new yellow bicycle to buy a magazine, the distraught Helga goes to pieces. But she isn't the only distressed mother Inspector Konrad Sejer encounters when he arrives in Glassverket to investigate Ida's disappearance. Ruth Rix, Helga's sunnier sister, is disturbed by the antisocial behavior of her truculent teenage son, Tomme, who is running around with a 22-year-old delinquent named Willy. And although Willy is the kind of fellow mothers consider a bad influence, his own mother feels differently - and becomes alarmed when he fails to return from an excursion to Copenhagen. The most unforgettable mother in the story, however, is Elsa Marie Mork, a bitter old woman who fanatically cleans house as a way of staving off the fears she harbors about her mentally retarded adult son, Emil. Elsa has a rough tongue that's forever lashing this hulking fellow, who lives alone, rides around on a three-wheeled bicycle and has spoken only one word - "No" - in 50 years. "Her heart was encased in a hard shell, but it still beat with compassion on the inside," Fossum writes, observing this brittle woman with detached, heartbreaking tenderness. These are the women the detective finds waiting anxiously for answers, and perhaps for some solace. But if Sejer is ever to assume that burden of compassion, he must find a way to get past the secrets and lies people have thrown up like battlement walls. And none are more impenetrable than the silence that both protects and isolates Emil. Eventually, that barrier also falls - not to violent attack but to Sejer's kindness and the strength of the social bonds of village life. "Ida's disappearance was like a net and it drew them all in," Fossum explains. "They were united in something," and that unity is not to be taken lightly. More than providing neighbors a common topic of gossip, the loss of a perfect child implies something awful about the future of their own imperfect children and, indeed, about the entire village. Dave Robicheaux, the Louisiana lawman in James Lee Burke's existential crime novels, is your prototypical running man. Honorable beyond question but scarred by experiences that have left him prone to "bloodlust," Dave keeps trying to outrun the ghosts of his past while chasing a hopeless dream - to restore some lost innocence in a corrupt world. SWAN PEAK (Simon & Schuster, $25.95) finds Dave and his sidekick, Clete Purcel, in western Montana, hoping to exorcise the nightmare of Hurricane Katrina with a little trout fishing and clean mountain air. But for all Burke's ecstatic invocations to the majesty of the Bitterroot Mountains ("the last good place"), this is no Garden of Eden. The millionaire rancher next door is drilling for oil and natural gas, thugs are hassling Clete about his role in the demise of a local mobster, and two college students have been tortured and murdered - one of the bodies dumped on the ranch of Dave's friend and host. "The West isn't the same place or culture I grew up in," the sheriff says, echoing Dave's own laments. Too true. But the rugged setting makes a grand stage for these battered characters, living "on the ragged edges of America" and slugging their way through this big, brawling novel. Setting a whodunit in an amateur writers' workshop is hardly an original notion. But it does offer the chance to inject some literary humor into the classic locked-room mystery even as it encourages close analysis of writers and the craft of writing, which is Jincy Willett's strategy in THE WRITING CLASS (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $24.95). Not that Willett doesn't get her comic digs in. A suicide note in the form of a poem, along with its cruel parody from a phantom "sniper" imbedded in the group, constitute first-rate satire. But the weekly sessions at a California extension university taught by a washed-up novelist named Amy Gallup offer more practical instruction than scorn. And while the would-be writers do get their knuckles rapped (and two unfortunates are murdered), not even the mean-spirited sniper can find anything evil to say about the endearing Amy, whose quirky Web site (called "Go Away") is a gold mine of literary nuggets. Since most mysteries set in Victorian England tend to follow romantic traditions, the picturesquely gritty novels of Will Thomas serve as a bracing alternative. The manly adventures of Cyrus Barker and his youthful apprentice, Thomas Llewelyn, are set in the seediest precincts of London and delve into the most unsavory of historical material from inflammatory anti-Semitism in "Some Danger Involved" to bomb-throwing Irish anarchists in "To Kingdom Come." THE BLACK HAND (Touchstone, paper, $14) may be Thomas's liveliest entertainment yet, opening as it does with the grisly murders of two Sicilian assassins and wrapping up with a boisterous dock war that brings a throng of lowlifes up from the sewers to play. In Karin Fossum's new thriller, the loss of a child implies something awful about the future of an entire village.