MYSTERY

Walter Mosley, having laid Easy Rawlins to rest, introduces a new detective, Leonid McGill, an ex-boxer and a hard- drinking PI of the old school, in The Long Fall (Riverhead, $25.95). McGill has not lived a good life. He’s worked for the Mob and been involved with businessmen whose businesses were at best marginally legal. He’s married in name only, and there’s a cop who’s made it his mission to catch McGill in the act of doing wrong. When McGill is hired to find four young men known only by their street names, it’s just a job. But as they start dying, he has to make a decision. In his quest to turn his life around, he knows he must act to find out what’s behind the deaths. And he must do this before the forces allied against him claim victory. We’ll hear from Leonid again as he moves through the city he loves, New York. Deb Morris

In The Monster In The Box (Scribner, $26), the 22nd installment of Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series, an aging Inspector unravels a tangled web, and along the way, readers are introduced to a young, single Police Constable Wexford, investigating his first murder case—and meeting a suspect who, with no hard evidence against him, reappears on the edge of various cases throughout Wexford’s career. As the book moves back and forth between past and present, we see Wexford’s suspicions grow but go unsatisfied, as the sleuth is continually frustrated in his effort to substantiate his instinct. A great fan of Ms. Rendell’s work, I consider this page-turner one of her best. Betsy Brown

Stephen Carter, whose focus in his first mysteries was the “darker nation,” now takes on the corruption of power in Jericho’s Fall (Knopf, $25.95). Ainsley is a man used to wielding power; he’s a former CIA head and Wall Street heavyweight. But now he’s dying. From his lair in the Rockies, he’s sent for a young woman he had an affair with when she was 19 and he was on the faculty at Princeton. When she arrives she’s drawn into a world rife with fear about Ainsley and his secrets. Jericho’s friends die, a dog is killed, and Beck DeForde has to figure things out before she, too, ends up dead. Deb Morris