After 25 books in 30 years, the novelty of a female private eye such as MWA Grand Master Muller's Sharon McCone has worn off, but McCone has only gained luster since her original appearance in Edwin of the Iron Shoes (1977). The San Francisco investigator is in top form as she unravels a case that may unravel her marriage. When Renshaw & Kessell International, a maverick corporate security firm dealing in contingency plans for kidnappings and hostage situations, hires McCone after a series of bombings has damaged its facilities, she starts by looking into the checkered pasts of the firm's co-owners. Readers may find the collateral damage that threatens to tear apart McCone's private life as involving as the search for the bomber, who soon moves from demolition to murder. Muller delivers the complete package, an absorbing mystery with a familiar and evolving cast and enough grit to give it satisfying substance. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

IT'S no wonder that the postwar noir thriller is making a comeback. With its fugitive heroes, undefined agents of menace and pervasive air of paranoia, the bleak formula is an ideal one for our modern-day age of anxiety. The one drawback to the classic model - as comes through in Lee Vance's overplotted but relentlessly readable debut novel, RESTITUTION (Knopf, $23.95) - is having to pick (and discard) new signifiers of corruption from among the many contemporary offerings. Vance, a retired general partner of Goldman Sachs, tries to cram all the sins of Western civilization into his fast and furiously paced morality story about a narcissistic investment banker who learns humility when he is set up as the chief suspect in his wife's murder. That leads to a vengeance plot involving Wall Street chicanery, Russian greed, Nazi war crimes, international terrorism, biological warfare and the ever-popular strong-arm tactics of Homeland Security. But while the heavily freighted plot continually threatens to go off the rails, the classy writing and the nonstop action keep it on track. Narrating this cautionary tale is its flawed protagonist, Peter Tyler, a Wall Street shark observed at such close range you feel as if you were in the tank with him. Tyler becomes humanized during the Faustian journey he undertakes after losing his wife, his job and his respectability to the sinister forces that have framed him - while inadvertently tipping him off to a huge stock swindle with grave consequences. On the run from American law enforcement and Russian gangsters as he frantically pursues a friend who might have set the entire chain of events in motion, Tyler broods on the questionable values that once defined his life and eventually comes to accept his current punishment as atonement for his past sins. "How did my life ever reach this point?" he asks himself, and by finding the courage to answer that existential question as honestly as he can, this humbled prima donna wins over even those hard-nosed readers who cheered when he lost four straight games of office Nerf ball. Vance plays his own excruciatingly complex game with great finesse, balancing the interior drama of Tyler's self-enlightenment with the spiraling complications of the financial crimes and the ripsnorting action of the chase scenes. And while Tyler's transformation into a human being gets a bit sticky as he becomes sensitized to the world's suffering orphans and AIDS patients, Vance strongly suggests that his chastened hero has a lot to teach his cocky fellow Americans on Wall Street. You call it love. Ruth Rendell calls it sick, and she has written a book that makes her point with exquisite cruelty. In THE WATER'S LOVELY (Crown, $25.95), she examines love from every imaginable angle, rendering much of it in a decidedly unhealthy light. Taking her theme from the opening image of a pedophile drowned in his bathtub, the queen of the psychological suspense novel slyly insinuates that many people who think they're feeling the purest of emotions for their spouses, children, siblings and lovers are more likely sloshing around in jealousy, lust and murderous rage. All the characters come in pairs in this subtly horrifying story, beginning with Ismay and Heather Sealand, sisters who live with their gaga mother (and her care-giving sister) while planning marriages to their respective boyfriends. Ismay and Heather share a festering secret that poisons more than one relationship in this London household before seeping out and infecting all the neighbors - including the homicidally inclined Marion and her abominable brother, Fowler, who have made a career of preying on the love-starved. Rendell develops her many characters with such cunning that an element of comic suspense is created around the question of which of them will crack up first. Don't bet on Marion. In this crowd, she's far too stable. For female mystery readers of a certain age, Sharon McCone was the genre's grown-up Nancy Drew, a smart, if overly stern, private investigator who built her own agency in San Francisco and mainly represented poor people in desperate circumstances. Marcia Muller, who introduced McCone in 1977, has taken her sleuth a good distance from her social-service roots, and the extent of that growth can be measured in THE EVERRUNNING MAN (Warner, $24.99), the 25th book in the series. This may come as a revelation for anyone who hasn't been keeping up, but McCone flies her own plane and chases terrorists these days, and in her latest adventure she has the gratification of saving her husband's security firm from being destroyed by an elusive bomber who seems to object to the shady history and "unorthodox methods" of its military-trained personnel. The story is violent and thick with international intrigue, but McCone fights to keep her cool and save her marriage - a different kind of role model for different times. Of course, for every intelligent and resourceful woman who surfaces in crime fiction, there is sure to be some crazed serial killer out there determined to maim, mutilate and otherwise take her down. David Ellis comes up with a particularly nasty specimen in EYE OF THE BEHOLDER (Putnam, $24.95), challenging his lawyer-sleuth, Paul Riley, to find the connection between two series of murders committed more than 15 years apart. Ellis, a former partner in a Chicago law firm, isn't squeamish about laying out the gory details in the initial massacre of six young women in 1989 or the copycat atrocities to follow. But the carnage is only the grabber for what is actually a very tricky legal mystery, and Riley, who prosecuted "the most famous serial killer our city has ever seen" when he was a raw youth, doesn't really hit his stride until he walks down those mean corridors that lead to the courtroom. Lee Vance In a first novel by a former partner of Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street shark is set up as the chief suspect in his wife's murder.

Sharon McCone's husband is part owner in RKI, a security company that has been targeted by an arsonist. The company hires McCone to find out why, and the trail leads to the shadowy pasts of Hy and his two partners. During the intense investigation, things get very personal and ugly. Once again, Muller, who has authored 24 books in this series, has tied past actions to the present in an unusual way. Her main characters may have grown more affluent, but they are also more understanding of human failings; as Muller illustrates perfectly, age brings wisdom. Muller lives in Northern California with her husband, Bill Pronzini. [See also Muller's Somewhere in the City: Selected Stories, reviewed below.-Ed.] (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A crisis looms in the McCone-Ripinsky marriage. Someone is blowing up the satellite offices of RKI, a practice that's not only bad for the security firm's business but lethal to its employees. So the partners, Dan Kessell, Gage Renshaw and Hy Ripinsky, ask Hy's wife, private eye Sharon McCone, to investigate. She starts digging, but the bombings continue. Indeed, the mystery reaches even higher up in the ranks when Kessell is murdered and Renshaw disappears. Even worse, McCone's deep background check on Hy uncovers a few unsavory secrets in his past that he somehow never got around to telling her about, such as supplying illegal arms and explosives to terrorists while he was a pilot for K Air in Thailand, where he first met Kessell and Renshaw. Though the revelations plunge her marriage into deep trouble, McCone stays on the RKI case, uncovering an identity theft back in southeast Asia that led to Kessell's murder, and a disinclination for parenthood that erupts explosively. The plot hinges on McCone's trust issues, and you probably know already how much you want to read about them. Muller devotees (Vanishing Point, 2006, etc.) will likely hang in there. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

"*Starred Review* Someone is bombing the offices and safe houses of REI, a security firm headquartered in San Francisco, and Hy Ripinksy, one of the partners in the firm, hires Sharon McCone to investigate. A shadowy figure, dubbed the ever-running man, has been seen leaving each location where there has been an explosion. When another device is detonated at REI's home office, a security guard dies, and McCone narrowly escapes. Her investigation leads to the discovery of corruption and other dark secrets in the past of the firm's partners revelations that may jeopardize her marriage, but McCone continues to probe, convinced that both her own and her husband's lives are at stake. Relatively few long-running mystery series succeed in dramatizing a hero's subtle changes over time, as he or she moves from one phase of life to another, but Muller's Sharon McCone novels excel in this regard (as do her husband Bill Pronzini's Nameless Detective novels). The marital tensions, as well as the suspenseful plot and the scenic locations along the California coast, make this one a surefire hit with McCone's many fans."--"Bibel, Barbara" Copyright 2007 Booklist