For a long time, bullheaded Mick hardly seems the ideal narrator for this delicately nuanced nightmare of a story. But he becomes far more interesting once French turns a rather plodding procedural into what it really wants to be - a psychological suspense story about the dangers of suppressing unthinkable thoughts. Like other young couples swept up in Ireland's economic miracle, the Spains couldn't face the shambles the recession had made of their lives. Instead, they focused their fears on a feral animal thought to be moving about in the attic and a silent intruder suspected of slipping into their home. Mick's own personal demons also awaken in this seaside village, once known as Broken Harbor, where his family spent their summer holidays. Something awful happened on their last vacation that traumatized the young Mick and shaped his values as a hard-nosed cop. His mantra - "Murder is chaos. . . . We stand against that, for order" - is the perfect definition of police work, which Mick describes with unexpected eloquence: "What I do is what the first men did. They built walls to keep back the sea. They fought the wolves for the hearth fire." In most crime novels, good cops and decent people court tragedy by disobeying the rules of society. But the stories French tells reflect our own savage times: the real trouble starts when you play fair and do exactly as you're told. It's always a pleasure to watch a keen mind absorbed in a difficult puzzle, which is how Dave Gurney distinguishes himself in John Verdon's tricky whodunits. In "Think of a Number," the retired New York police detective unscrambled data codes. He solved another improbable riddle in "Shut Your Eyes Tight." Now, in LET THE DEVIL SLEEP (Crown, $25), Dave is bedeviled by a psychopath who has resumed the killing spree he began a decade earlier. This time the so-called Good Shepherd is targeting the survivors of his original victims, who have agreed to appear in a TV documentary about the impact of homicide on their own lives. It takes a lot of cajoling on the part of the annoying young woman making this documentary to rouse Dave from the depression he fell into after his last case, which isn't the romantic funk Verdon seems to think it is. Nor is his exhaustive dissection of Dave's dull marriage worth all the verbiage. And while Dave loves to go mano a mano with the F.B.I., points are deducted when the agent is as thick as two planks. You have to admire an author with the guts to make fun of his chosen genre. POTBOILER (Putnam, $25.95) is Jesse Kellerman's parody of the offbeat thrillers he normally writes about clever young men whose sense of adventure draws them into dangerous situations. Arthur Pfefferkorn, his current protagonist, is neither young nor adventurous, having written one novel and then settled into a boring existence as a college professor. But when an old friend, an obscenely successful author of junky thrillers, dies with an unpublished manuscript on his desk, Arthur seizes his chance to co-opt his rival's career. All the air goes out of this satire once Kellerman maneuvers Arthur into a clumsy international espionage plot - but it was fun while it lasted. Print journalists are an endangered species, so it's nice to come across two new sleuths drawn from their thinning ranks. In Joy Castro's first novel, HELL OR HIGH WATER (Thomas Dunne/ St. Martin's, $25.99), a young reporter named Nola Céspedes almost passes up the chance to write an investigative series on the 800 or so sex offenders still on the loose in New Orleans, years after the chaos of Hurricane Katrina. (Ding ding! Here's the first clue that Nola is an amateur at heart. Who would turn down such a sensational assignment?) Once it dawns on her that whoever kidnapped a tourist from the French Quarter might be found among these same "creeps," Nola pursues the story with more passion than professional savvy, and with a soulful affection for her battered yet still beautiful city. On the other hand, Willie Black is all business - newspaper business. In OREGON HILL (Permanent Press, $28), Howard Owen's world-weary crime reporter covers the night beat for a hardpressed daily in Richmond, Va. When Willie's number comes up for downsizing, he wins a reprieve by chasing the terrific story he's working on here - about a headless corpse tossed in the South Anna River. Owen has recruited his sick, sad and creatively crazy characters from a rough neighborhood cut off from the rest of the city when the expressway was built. If anyone is watching out for the forgotten citizens of Oregon Hill, it's Willie, who grew up there and speaks the local language, a crisp and colorful urban idiom we can't wait to hear again. 'What I do is what the first men did. They built walls to keep back the sea. They fought the wolves.'

Still recuperating from the physical and psychic wounds he suffered in closing his last case (Shut Your Eyes Tight, 2011, etc.), retired NYPD Detective Dave Gurney is drawn into yet another one, a 10-year-old serial killing that's never been closed. As a favor to Connie Clarke, the freelance reporter who made him famous as the Supercop, Gurney agrees to give her daughter, journalism student Kim Corazon, a little help on a project that's suddenly mushroomed from an academic thesis to a series on RAM TV. To flesh out her sense of how murder devastates a lot more people than the murder victims, Kim has interviewed the widows and children of victims of the Good Shepherd, who fired on half a dozen drivers in black Mercedes sedans in upstate New York and Massachusetts, left little toy animals at each crime scene, and sent the cops a diatribe against the greedy rich that yielded a very clear psychological profile but proved no help in closing the case a decade ago. Initially agreeing to accompany Kim on her rounds for a single day, Dave predictably gets sucked into deeper involvement with the grieving relatives, some of them happier than others to air their grief; the scalawag front-office types at RAM TV; Kim's accusatory ex-boyfriend Robert Montague, n Meese; and the law officials who neither solved the case nor want to talk about it now. Of the latter, New York State Police Senior Investigator Jack Hardwick is the most rational and helpful; his colleague Max Clinter, maddened by PTSD after he let the Shepherd escape his last crime scene, the craziest; and FBI agent Matthew Trout the most closemouthed and menacing. Endless allusions to Dave's brilliance can't obscure the fact that the colorless killer's plot is based on a clich so well-established in the genre that experienced readers, spotting it long before the tortured genius, will feel pretty doggoned clever themselves.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Verdon, who rejuvenated the impossible crime in his 2010 debut, Think of a Number, shows there's much more that can be done with the serial killer plot in his breakneck, knockout third Dave Gurney whodunit (after 2011's Shut Your Eyes Tight). Retired detective Gurney, dubbed "the NYPD Supercop" by the media for his phenomenal homicide clearance rate, once again can't resist the opportunity to match wits with a brilliant murderer-in this case, the self-named "the Good Shepherd," the subject of a reality TV project that a journalist asks his help on. Never identified, the Good Shepherd struck six times in the Syracuse area a decade earlier, targeting drivers of black Mercedes as part of his crusade against the wealthy. Gurney takes an iconoclastic approach to the cold case while tackling other, possibly unrelated investigations. The tension is palpable on virtually every page of a story that perfectly balances the protagonist's complex inner life with an elaborately constructed puzzle. Agent: Molly Friedrich, the Friedrich Agency. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The old crime-novel convention that sad sleuths make the best sleuths is trotted out once again in Verdon's third novel starring retired NYPD detective Dave Gurney. Recovering slowly from the wounds he suffered in his last case (Shut Your Eyes Tight, 2011), Gurney keeps shutting himself down psychologically in reaction to emotional trauma. He and his wife are holed up in their Catskills country house, both suffering from his depression. His wife urges him to do a favor for the journalist whose article made him an NYPD superstar. The journalist's daughter wants Gurney to consult with her about her master's thesis, which explores the long-lasting pain suffered by the families of murder victims, especially those of a particular serial killer known as the Good Shepherd. Gurney needs to say yes to this assignment to provide a hook into the case, but the device seems very contrived, given that most cops despise journalists. There are few surprises along the way as the Good Shepherd surfaces again, this time homing in on Gurney. A good hunter-hunted story but not up to Verdon's previous work.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2010 Booklist