Count on it. Whenever people lose faith in their political leaders, the popular culture reflexively responds by killing off parents. Younger heroes, from Harry Potter to baby X-Men, are easily redirected to reliable surrogate authority figures, but in troubled times mature protagonists like police officers and lone-wolf detectives are more often left reeling from the deaths of fathers and the treachery of mentors. Mark Billingham, who writes gritty police procedurals featuring Tom Thome, a detective with the London police, dives directly into the spirit of the times with BLOODLINE (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $24.99), which examines the volatile parent-child dynamic from an unexpected angle. On the most conventional level, Thorne's personal hopes of getting married and becoming a father are dashed when his lover discovers that the baby she's carrying "is not viable." But the counterweight to this facile narrative point is a psychologically twisted and strikingly original plot involving the legacy of a serial killer, Raymond Garvey, who killed seven women in four months and died of a brain tumor in prison. Now, 15 years later, someone is murdering the grown children of Garvey's victims, presenting Thorne and his colleagues on the murder squad with the daunting task of finding and protecting these survivors, some still too traumatized to look out for themselves. To make the job even more complicated, a man claiming to be Garvey's son has raised a troubling question: whether the brain trauma that altered Garvey's personality might absolve him of responsibility for his crimes. The relentlessly swift pace and high emotional pitch of the narrative may say "thriller," but Billingham has become too sophisticated a writer to settle for the cheap theatrics that galvanized his early novels. Grim as it is, the violence serves a purpose, making us consider all the innocent people whose lives are touched and often crushed in the aftermath of a crime. In one sensitively written scene after another, Billingham probes the lives of the "other victims" of the homicides, from bereft parents to kindly neighbors to perfect strangers. "He knows that it will pass eventually," Billingham says of a conductor who falls into a deep depression after two people are killed under the wheels of his train. "Anyway, he would worry about what kind of a man he was if he was not changed by it." Unlike those pretenders who play in dark alleys and think they're tough, James Sallis writes from an authentic noir sensibility, a state of mind that hovers between amoral indifference and profound existential despair. As alienated antiheroes go, they don't get any darker than the protagonist of THE KILLER IS DYING (Walker, $24), a hit man who calls himself Christian and is, in fact, dying. Although he often sounds like a poet, Christian isn't much for human emotions. But he does take pride in doing a "clean" job, and it's a professional affront when an unknown assassin steps between Christian and his designated target and botches the kill. Even as he piles up the images of impending death and decay, Sallis deals Christian a final twist of fate - the creature connections he has spent his life running away from. Dale Sayles, a Phoenix homicide detective whose life is no bowl of cherries, finds himself commiserating with the dying hit man because his own wife has just gone into a hospice. More inexplicably, an abandoned boy named Jimmie has been dreaming the killer's dreams. All three share the essential human bond of loss. "People leave us," Jimmie tells himself. "All our lives are a going-away." Maureen Jennings has always had a keen eye for marginalized members of society in critical need of a champion. (In a series of historical novels set in Toronto in the 1890s, she has even sent her big-hearted police detective, William Murdoch, into battle on behalf of mistreated animals.) The detective she introduces in SEASON OF DARKNESS (McClelland & Stewart, $22.95), which takes place in England a year into World War II, lacks Murdoch's highly developed sense of social injustice. But as the only police inspector in his insular Shropshire village, Tom Tyler can still identify those who could use his protection, including a contingent of young Land Girls who have come to work on the farms. When one of them is murdered, and then another, Tyler finds himself torn between loyalty to his neighbors and his sense of duty - a conflict that could easily take a Tom Tyler series through the end of the war. Readers who lament the loss of Henning Mankell's great Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander, can still get their fix of Scandinavian gloom from the novels of Kjell Eriksson. THE HAND THAT TREMBLES (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne, $24.99) offers compassionate insights into the minds of people who tend to brood during those long winter nights. Ann Lindell, a conscientious cop based in the cathedral city of Uppsala, considers the human foot that has washed up on a remote beach and wonders why the handful of people who live in this isolated region don't die of loneliness. But even those who manage to escape - like the respected Uppsala county commissioner who simply walked out of a meeting and disappeared - take their melancholy thoughts with them. And while the two narratives don't really mesh, Ebba Segerberg's translation of Eriksson's austere prose beautifully captures the spiritual chill of this desolate landscape. Does the brain trauma that altered a killer's personality absolve him of responsibility for his crimes?

Why was Elsie Bates killed early one morning-first hit by a car, then fatally shot and left by the side of the road? It's 1940 England, and the country is recovering from the retreat of the British army from Dunkirk. Small-town DI Tom Tyler now has a big-city crime on his hands, and there's nothing cozy or sweet about the villain. Complicating the situation is the temporary German internee camp plunked down in the village's midst. Mix in paranoia, MI5, and a little post-traumatic stress disorder, and all bets are off. You can be assured of this, though: one victim isn't enough for this murderer. VERDICT Canadian master storyteller and screenwriter Jennings-known for her 19th-century historicals (e.g., the Murdoch series)-launches a trilogy with this superb entry. Readers will be swept away by the sagalike tone and the characters' singular problems and traits. Tyler's family suffers in this first volume, and I'm anxious to see where Jennings takes everyone in the next installment. Think the British television series Foyle's War for comparison. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.