IF you believe that every patch of ground comes with its own story, then Val McDermid is the storyteller for you. In "A Place of Execution," she unearthed the secrets of an insular village in rural Derbyshire that functioned like an ancient feudal tribe when doling out justice. In "The Distant Echo," she uncovered the shameful history of a provincial town in Scotland. Even her more conventional series novels featuring the peripatetic detectives Tony Hill and Carol Jordan make ingenious use of their international settings. The bucolic rolling landscape of England's Lake District yields an unusually rich and complex plot in THE GRAVE TATTOO (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95), which is as much a literary puzzle as it is a murder mystery. The story opens in the village of Fellhead with the discovery of a body long buried in a bog, an event in itself so extraordinary that a forensic anthropologist with the euphonious name of River Wilde is swiftly dispatched to the scene. Interest is heightened once Dr. Wilde determines that the desiccated cadaver was tattooed in the manner of 18th-century sailors who visited the South Sea islands - and that he had been murdered. A parallel investigation into the identity of the bog body is initiated by a scholar named Jane Gresham, who suspects that the tattooed sailor was Fletcher Christian, the first mate and lead mutineer on the H.M.S. Bounty. Jane (like Christian, a native of Fellhead) hopes to prove the local legend that he escaped from Pitcairn Island and made his way back to England, also validating her own theory that he confided the true story of his ill-fated adventures to his onetime schoolmate, William Wordsworth. Jane's efforts to find a record of these events in a lost epic by the great poet attracts some unsavory characters to Fellhead, including her ex-boyfriend (now the agent of an unscrupulous dealer in rare manuscripts), a fugitive suspect in a London murder case and a killer whose motives are less than academic. Val McDermid Once all these narrative balls are tossed in the air, McDermid provides enough violence to add real urgency to her intriguing premise, which the late curator of the Wordsworth Trust declared "improbable, but charmingly plausible." Even without the melodramatic plot twists, the novel's scholarship is exciting on its own terms, and entirely appropriate for a district so wildly beautiful that it attracts both poets and pirates. All it takes is one good man - a detective, of course - to humanize events that confound understanding. In THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM (Soho, $22), an astonishing first novel by Matt Beynon Rees, the former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine, that honorable man is Omar Yussef, a middle-aged history teacher at a United Nations-run school for Palestinian children outside Bethlehem. When a Christian friend is unjustly accused of collaborating in the Israeli assassination of a local resistance fighter, this mild-mannered schoolteacher finds the courage to stand up to a milita outfit, the Martyrs Brigades, while conducting his own clandestine search for the real killer. Setting a mystery in the epicenter of a war zone challenges the genre conventions, but it doesn't change the rules. In fact, it clarifies the role of the detective as the voice of reason, crying to be heard above the cacophony of gun-barrel politics. Watching friends die and neighbors turn on one another, Omar Yussef decides that "it's time for me to scream." In a world where civilization has broken down into "ignorant, simple-minded, violent politics," this decent man commits the ultimate act of heroism-keeping an open mind. The glossy sheen of Manhattan noir that Peter Spiegelman brought to "Black Maps" and "Death's Little Helpers" has become darker and more lustrous in RED CAT (Knopf, $22.95), a morality tale whose depiction of S-and-M performance art gives the story a peculiarly modern twist. John March, a private eye proud to be the black sheep in a staid family of merchant bankers, narrates in the cool voice of someone who knows his way around the trendier enclaves of NoLita, including the boutique hotel where his married brother David has been having illicit sex with a woman he knows only as Wren. Alarmed by her demands for a moral accounting, David turns to his brother, who discovers that this mystery woman is a video artist, secretly taping her sexual encounters and selling them through high-end art dealers. "There was something in his gaunt face that reminded me of a monk," March says of one dealer. "The abbot, perhaps, of a prosperous and deeply tanned order." No less than the elegant cut of the author's prose and the nice lines of his characters, the fashionable aesthetics of "noir porn" are presented here in high style. Unlike old friends, who have a way of changing careers, marital status or religious affiliation when you lose touch, series detectives can usually be counted on to stay in town and on the job until they drop. Jack Liffey, the Los Angeles private eye in John Shannon's broad-shouldered novels, is one of those stalwart souls. Long a champion of teenagers in trouble, especially kids from L.A.'s culturally torn-up ethnic neighborhoods, this hard-boiled sleuth is on familiar turf in THE DARK STREETS (Pegasus, $25), searching for a Korean film student named Soon-Lin Kim who went missing while filming a documentary about Asian "comfort women" forced into sexual bondage during World War II. But the landscape shifts when Liffey discovers that a paramilitary group of Asian-Americans has taken an interest in Soon-Lin Kim's student project. Although racial tensions always run high in Liffey's world, the violent turn they take here causes him to question his faith in "the innate goodness of man." And another old friend loses his way in the dark. In Val McDermid's latest mystery, the first victim is a body in a bog - an 18th-century sailor covered with tattoos.

Evil stalks the inhabitants of a remote Scottish island in the bestselling British author's fourth in-your-face thriller (The Devil of Nanking, 2005, etc.). Pig Island is home to the religious cult Psychogenic Healing Ministries, whose members live safely apart from their founder Malachi Dove, a deranged visionary who holes up (rather like Apocalypse Now's Colonel Kurtz) in a valley behind a barricade festooned with severed pigs' heads. The possibility that the Psychogenics are practicing devil worship adds to the mix of elements of the classic British film The Wicker Man. Oh, and there's a not-exactly-human beast roaming the neighborhood--which could of course have been "created" by the island's former exploitation as a dumping-ground for chemical waste. These beguiling oddities attract the attention of hoax-busting reporter Joe Oakes (his earlier exposure of Pastor Dove's doings had forced the cult's flight to Pig Island), who travels to the site with his spunky wife Lexie, with whom he shares the narration. In the past, Hayder has masterfully toyed with readers' nerves, but here the big payoff fizzles: Neither the identity of The Creature nor the ponderous shock ending is nearly as surprising as the author seems to think. The novel is further flawed by more product placement than you'll see in your average California-inflected slacker flick. Hayder's use of outr plots, settings and characters is both the strength of her earlier fiction and the source of a formula that's rapidly hardening into clich. When she's on, she's an adventurous, edgy, literate writer. This book is, alas, far from her best. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Hayder skillfully melds an atmosphere of fear and a gripping sense of place in this thriller set on a remote Scottish island owned by Psychogenic Healing Ministries, whose followers the locals believe to be Satanists. A humanoid creature with a long tail has been captured on video, and repeated analysis reveals no hint of technological fraud. But world-weary, thirtysomething hoax buster Joe Oakes is on the case. His history with PHM's former leader, Malachi Dove, spans two decades. Oakes blames faith-healer Dove for his aunt's horrendous death and for duping him into believing he had a deadly tumor. He published an expose, and Dove's threatened retaliatory lawsuit fizzled because the healer was presumed dead. Years later, Oakes finally lands an invitation to Pig Island, home of 30 PHM cultists. It's rather a paradise, except for the occasional smell of putrefying flesh. To Oakes' amazement, isolated on the other side of the island behind a row of pig skulls is none other than Malachi Dove. --Whitney Scott Copyright 2007 Booklist

As a fledgling journalist, Joe Oakes wrote an expos? of a faith healer and gained an enemy. Twenty years later, after building a career as a hoax-busting investigative journalist, Oakes hears new rumors about his nemesis, Malachi Dove, who lives on an island off of Scotland with his followers. Oakes finagles his way onto the island and uncovers horrific events. Even as he and his wife (who narrates some of the novel's middle chapters) try to help Dove's daughter overcome a physical malady, they become trapped in a deadly game. Hayder (The Devil of Nanking) skillfully builds suspense, developing her characters and creating a tense, oppressive atmosphere; the result is another creepy, suspenseful thriller. Recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/06.]-Beth Lindsay, Washington State Univ. Lib., Pullman (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Hayder's dark, inventive 2006 thriller begins as journalist Joe Oakes arrives on a secluded island off the western coast of Scotland to visit a reclusive cult on remote Pig Island. Joe is there to investigate a supposed half-animal, half-human creature distantly glimpsed in a tourist's film, but his real interest is in the cult's founder, Malachi Dove, who's now living behind an impenetrable barricade topped by pig skulls. On the island, Joe, whose wife, Lexi, is unhappy and delusional, becomes infatuated with Malachi's strange young daughter, Angeline. When cultists are murdered and Malachi goes missing, Joe and Lexi take Angeline to their London home, where trouble inevitably follows. Portions of the book are narrated by each of the three. For the well-born Lexi's chapters, reader Crossley uses an upper-class British speech that shifts from sharp reality to almost lyrical fantasy. Angeline, a natural adapter, moves swiftly and easily from wild-child halting speech to the loquacious nattering of a normal raised teenager. But Crossley is at his performing best portraying rough-edged Joe as he stumbles through an assortment of intense emotions including fear, shock, helpless infatuation, self-disgust, jealousy, and, finally, despair. A Grove paperback. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.