WHEN SHE'S writing about her beloved Venice, Donna Leon can do no wrong. And earthly REMAINS (Atlantic Monthly, $25), her new mystery featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, is one of her best. It's also one of her saddest, dealing as it does with the seemingly unstoppable polluting of the great lagoon. "We've poisoned it all, killed it all," mourns Davide Casati, the aged caretaker of the house on the island of Sant'Erasmo where Brunetti is taking a medical leave for job-induced stress. Casati is a wonderful character. (This would seem to make him doomed to die, but you never know.) An authentic boatman who built his own puparin, a graceful, gondola-like rowing boat that makes Brunetti swoon, Casati loves every watery inch of his domain. He's familiar with each nook and canal, and he even raises bees. It's the bees that give the book both its plot and its heart. "Man's turned against them," the boatman says, referring to the human and industrial waste that's poisoning their habitat. The death of the bees reverberates through the story, a warning to all. An ardent classicist who anticipates long stretches of boredom on his enforced vacation, Brunetti has packed plenty of reading matter: Pliny, Herodotus, Euripides and that avid gossip, Suetonius. Instead, he puts himself in Casati's hands. He rows with him, goes swimming with him, and soaks up his knowledge of the vast lagoon and its floating spits of land. He learns about "bees and fish and birds, and how to build a boat, and how to navigate by the stars." But when murder enters the story, as it must, Brunetti remembers that he's a cop and opens an investigation. "The islands are small places," he declares, "and there are no secrets." Before tragedy strikes, this conscientious cop is the happiest we've ever seen him in this socially aware and intensely felt series. But when he calls his wife and tries to describe his experiences, "Brunetti knew that, no matter how much he babbled, he was incapable of conveying the magic of the scene." Leon dares to try, once again earning the gratitude of her devoted readers. IF LANDSCAPES COULD kill, the English Fenland would surely be high on the suspect list. Fran Hall never wanted to move to the "flat, watery, abandoned" place that Christobel Kent describes so severely in her domestic thriller THE LOVING HUSBAND (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27). But Fran's husband, Nathan, who grew up in this forbidding terrain, made the decision for her; and before she knew it, she had given up her job in London and was hanging blackout curtains to screen her view of its sinister scenery. Imagine her horror, then, when she finds Nathan dead in a ditch, stabbed with one of their kitchen knives. Kent is a champion plotter, using well-placed flashbacks to find interesting characters who might reveal the real Nathan to a wife who hadn't known her enigmatic mate very well. (If he wasn't spending his cherished one or two nights a week at the pub, where was he going?) But when an old friend of Nathan's does turn up, he accuses Fran of the murder. The novel's slow-building resolution comes silently, engulfing you like quicksand. "THIS IS A dangerous country," a character in Jorgen Brekke's chilly thriller the fifth element (Minotaur, $26.99) says of Norway. "Not everyone can stand as much silence as they have here." Factor in the incessant snowstorms and the vast arctic forests and it's a wonder that Odd Singsaker, a police inspector in the cathedral city of Trondheim, doesn't have more homicides (and suicides) to contend with. Singsaker is actually more concerned about his alcoholic wife, Felicia, who went on a bender, failed to catch her flight home from Oslo and is now missing. The search for Felicia is soon buried under additional plot layers. A book collector is murdered and his young son kidnapped. A couple of students steal a dope dealer's stash. After choking a marijuana grower by forcing him to eat an entire batch of cannabis brownies, a philosophical killer ponders the existence of evil. In Steven T. Murray's translation, it's all very entertaining, but the mash-up of these plots with Felicia's disappearance proves to be a stretch too far. BERNIE GUNTHER IS living on the Riviera, working as a hotel concierge when Prussian blue (Marian Wood/Putnam, $27) opens in 1956. Philip Kerr's unorthodox German hero, who survived World War II as a Berlin hotel detective, revisits his past in flashbacks to 1939, when he was a cop on the Murder Commission, and not a very popular one at that. In 1956, with his hotel closed for the winter, Bernie is strongarmed by Gen. Erich Mielke, the deputy head of the East German Stasi, into finding and eliminating a female agent who's now too dangerous to remain alive. But in an unlucky turnabout, Bernie the hunter becomes Bernie the prey as this chase merges in his mind with one from before the war, in which he was fed amphetamines while tracking a murderer who fouled the mountain retreat where Hitler was soon to celebrate his birthday. Even on a dope binge, Bernie is still one of the most appealing detectives in the field. ? MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

Edgar-finalist Kerr's stunning 12th Bernie Gunther novel (after 2016's The Other Side of Silence) races along on two parallel tracks. In the first, set in 1956, Bernie, who's been working as a hotel concierge in Cannes, flees France because he bailed out of performing a hit for Stasi chief Erich Mielke, killing a Stasi agent in the process. The hazardous journey takes him by train, bicycle, and foot toward West Germany. In the main narrative, set in April 1939, SS Gen. Reinhard Heydrich, Bernie's boss, orders him to Berchtesgaden, Hitler's mountain retreat. A sniper has fatally shot Karl Flex, a civil engineer in Martin Bormann's employ, on the deck of Hitler's villa, the Berghof. Bernie has mere days to solve the crime before Hitler returns to Berchtesgaden to celebrate his 50th birthday. Trying to identify Flex's killer and bring him to justice proves to be the least of Bernie's worries. Kerr once again brilliantly uses a whodunit to bring to horrifying life the Nazi regime's corruption and brutality. Author tour. Agent: Caradoc King, A.P. Watt (U.K.). (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* This case had it all . . . absurdity, alienation, existential anxiety, and no shortage of likely and unlikely suspects. So says the ever-cynical Bernie Gunther in May of 1939, after being dispatched to Adolf Hitler's Bavarian retreat to catch a killer before the Leader arrives to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. Bernie's fans know well that Kerr is a master of parallel narratives, one set in the postwar years and another flashing back to Bernie's experiences before and during WWII. That's the case here, too, and Kerr has never done his time-juggling act with greater skill. The novel begins in 1956 with Bernie accosted by the Stasi, East Germany's security arm, and told that either he kills an unreliable Soviet agent, a loose end from The Other Side of Silence (2016), or be killed himself. The Stasi agent charged with making sure Bernie does the job is an old frenemy from 1939, prompting Bernie, as he attempts to escape his captors, to remember his time in Bavaria. Both stories are compelling, but it's the double- and triple-dealing atop Hitler's mountain that steals the show. Throughout the series, Bernie has managed to stay alive despite pummeling Hitler's henchmen with Chandlerian bons mots, and here it's Martin Bormann (a burly middleweight going to seed, with a proper double chin and a nose like a parboiled turnip) who is on the receiving end of Bernie's verbal jousting. As always, Kerr lets Bernie have fun with genre conventions without losing sight of the horror behind the tough talk. At the top of everyone's WWII mystery list.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2017 Booklist

In this 12th Bernie Gunther thriller (after The Other Side of Silence), it's 1956, and Bernie is still working as a concierge at the Grand Hotel on the French Riviera. Over an unexpected dinner, Erich Mielke, deputy head of the East German secret police, blackmails Bernie into poisoning Anne French, a female agent and Bernie's former lover, with thallium, whose antidote is the pigment Prussian blue. To ensure that -Bernie follows through, Mielke sends Friedrich Korsch, a former Gestapo homicide detective, to track Bernie as he bolts for Germany. On his perilous journey, Bernie reflects back to 1939, when he and Korsch collaborated in covering up a shocking murder at the Berghof, Hitler's mountain home in Obersalzberg. Back then, Bernie could have prevented Martin Bormann, Hitler's private secretary, from planning the sweeping destruction of countless others. In 1956, Bernie and Korsch converge explosively over haunting issues still lingering in Germany. VERDICT In this skillfully plotted thriller, Kerr punctures the present with the painful past. Fans of the series won't be disappointed. [See Prepub Alert, 10/24/16.]-Jerry P. Miller. Cambridge, MA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.