JOE GUNTHER, ONE of the most honorable lawmen you'd ever hope to meet, is the designated mourner in Archer Mayor's rugged regional mysteries. Over the course of some two dozen novels, the former Brattleboro cop, now a senior officer with the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, has borne witness to all the scourges of modern times - from the meth epidemic to freakish acts of nature like Hurricane Irene - that have laid havoc to his home state. But in the background, there have always been glimpses of another painful legacy - the human fallout from the Vietnam War - that now steps out from the shadows in PROOF POSITIVE (Minotaur, $25.99). No one in the village of Dummerston gave much thought to an eccentric hoarder named Benjamin Kendall until a hapless thief burgles his old farmhouse and finds Kendall buried under the towering mounds of detritus. A sad business, but not a case for a major crimes unit like the V.B.I., you'd think; until another body is pulled from the artfully arranged rubble. As it turns out, the reclusive hoarder was a photojournalist who had suffered a brain injury in Vietnam. Thanks to an enterprising art student who arranged for an exhibition of his war photos at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Kendall had finally come to the attention of the art world - and of an enemy who would kill to keep the past buried in the past. Gunther, himself an ex-combat soldier, understands that to someone like Kendall, Vietnam was "a war that had fed on his soul forever after." That sentiment is shared by vets like Willy Kunkle, Gunther's "downcast, pessimistic, sarcastic" deputy. Not to mention that other vet, the mysterious power broker bankrolling the two sociopathic hit men who murdered Kendall and are now after the art student in possession of his war images. The manhunt takes Gunther on a rather pointless trip south, through the treacherous terrain of New Jersey and into foreign lands like Philadelphia and Washington. Which is how it comes to pass that one of the killers has the last, most eloquent word on Vermont, "this far northern, thinly populated state, reputed for its independence, mountainous isolation and hardy, terse inhabitants," where "nature was the ruling force - patient, benignly dominant and passively lethal to the unprepared." READERS IN THE KNOW, like you and you and you, know to study Anne Perry's Victorian mysteries for coded references to contemporary issues. There are plenty of those in BLOOD ON THE WATER (Ballantine, $26), which opens with a terrorist bombing of a pleasure boat that sends some 200 partygoers to their watery deaths. The opening of the Suez Canal has been contentious, and with foreign dignitaries on board the party boat and an Egyptian malcontent now under arrest, the case is thought to be too politically fraught to be entrusted to the Thames River Police. William Monk, commander of the river police and the hero of this unfailingly rewarding series, is stung by the insult and sets out to prove that the investigation was a travesty, and the trial a farce. A second trial has a fairer outcome, but it leaves the public reeling from the realization that the English justice system, "the bedrock on which their beliefs of themselves were built," could be corrupted by men who place personal gain above justice. ARE WE THERE YET? Keigo Higashino again proves his mastery of the diabolical puzzle mystery with MALICE (Minotaur, $24.99), a story with more turns, twists, switchbacks and sudden stops than a Tokyo highway during Golden Week. The narrator, Osamu Nonoguchi, seems like a good guy, the sort of person who goes out of his way to admire a cherry tree in blossom, as he does here when paying a visit to his friend Kunihiko Hidaka, a celebrated author who is moving to Canada. But the first rule of thumb when reading this crafty author is never to trust the narrator. Sure enough, when Hidaka is found dead and the detective Kyoichiro Kaga picks up the narrative, the policeman quickly fingers the victim's friend as his killer. Admirers of the well-made whodunit know the drill about questioning facts and suspecting everyone. Higashino plays this game as well as any of those legendary golden age authors poring over their railroad timetables. But what makes him a genius at this sport is the care with which he devises a motive - in this case, professional jealousy - to fit the crime. THE PEOPLE IN M. L. Longworth's charming Provençal mysteries always seem to be on holiday, MURDER ON THE ÎLE SORDOU (Penguin, paper, $15) brings Antoine Verlaque and Marine Bonnet, sleuths in this series, to the Locanda Sordou, a refurbished grand hotel on an enchanted island in an archipelago off the coast of Marseilles. The idea is to pick the guest you would like to see murdered from a gallery of stereotypes: an elderly poet, a faded party girl, a has-been movie star, a vulgar American couple and a pair of picky Parisians. Longworth never seems to run out of verbal coinage to describe the beauty of Sordou, the manifold glories of the hotel or the many moods of the Mediterranean Sea. And it's pure pleasure to watch Émile Villey, the Locanda's chef, devising ingenious ways to create wondrous meals on what is essentially a barren rock in the middle of the sea.

Renowned novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is found murdered in his locked study, in his locked home. He is discovered by his wife, Rie, and his closest friend, Osamu Nonoguchi. When Tokyo Police Detective Kyochiro Kaga begins to investigate, he is surprised to see Nonoguchi; they had once been colleagues on the faculty of a middle school. Evidence leads Kaga to charge Nonoguchi with murder, and Nonoguchi freely admits to it. But Kaga's superiors won't bring the case to trial without knowing why Nonoguchi murdered his friend, and the accused refuses to explain. Kaga must deduce the motive as well as the killer's identity. Higashino tells his intricate story through Kaga's notes and Nonoguchi's written responses (he, too, is a writer). As in Salvation of a Saint (2012), Higashino focuses almost solely on evidence. At the outset, his approach seems unsettling, but the Edgar nominee knows his business; Malice soon becomes awfully hard to put down.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2014 Booklist

The creator of Detective Galileo (Salvation of a Saint, 2012, etc.) returns with another fiendishly clever Chinesemake that Japanesebox of a whydunit. Kunihiko Hidaka and Osamu Nonoguchi were childhood friends. Hidaka became a best-selling novelist, Nonoguchi a middle-school teacher who retired to write children's books. Returning to Hidaka's home a few hours after he last saw him, Nonoguchi, accompanied by Rie, Hidaka's much younger second wife, finds his body, felled by a paperweight and strangled. Despite the alibi Nonoguchi offers Kyoichiro Kaga and the detailed written account of his movements during the fatal evening, the police detective, who once taught at Nonoguchi's school, can't help suspecting his former colleague of "creat[ing] a fictional account of the events in order to divert suspicion from himself." That's an ingenious idea, but Higashino is only getting started. As Nonoguchi and Kaga continue to spar with each other, the detective digs deeper into the past, uncovering startling revelations about the death of Hidaka's first wife, the two men's school days, and their literary careers, before coming up with a solution, and then another, and still another. Each time you're convinced Higashino's wrung every possible twist out of his golden-age setup, he comes up with a new one. If you still miss the days of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, you can't do better than this fleet, inventive retro puzzler. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Starred Review. Set in 1996, Higashino's first Kyoichiro Kaga novel to be translated into English is as fiendishly clever as The Devotion of Suspect X (2011), the first in his Detective Galileo series. Kaga finds that he has a personal connection to a murder case. Popular novelist Kunihiko Hidaka was strangled in his home, in some unspecified part of Japan, not long after a visit from his old friend Osamu Nonoguchi, who was also Kaga's colleague when the detective was a teacher. Nonoguchi, one of two potential suspects, has no obvious motive for committing the crime, unlike the other suspect, Miyako Fujio. A few years earlier, Hidaka wrote a successful novel featuring a nasty lead character, a thinly disguised version of Miyako's brother, Masayo. Higashino offers one twist after another, all of which touch on the theme suggested by the book's title. Readers will marvel at the artful way the plot builds to the solution of Hidaka's murder. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Starred Review. In this new offering from the best-selling author of The Devotion of Suspect X and Salvation of a Saint, Det. Kyochiro Kaga steps to center stage to solve a strange and baffling case. When an acclaimed novelist is viciously murdered in his home the night before he moves to Vancouver with his wife, Kaga is brought in to investigate. Arriving at the crime scene, he recognizes the writer's best friend, Osamu Nonoguchi, who discovered the body. Kaga had known Nonoguchi when they worked as teachers in the same public school. As the detective unravels the relationship between an acclaimed author and his old school friend, it is clear that the link between the two men is based on shifting stories, different motives, and threads of interconnection that travel back into the past. VERDICT This smart and original mystery is a true page-turner that carries the reader through theories and relationships that will baffle, surprise, and draw out suspicion until the final few pages. With each book, Higashino continues to elevate the modern mystery as an intense and inventive literary form. [Library marketing.]-Ron Samul, New London, CT (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.