L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

A television personality battered to death and abandoned in a dumpster in South-Central L.A.; a music mogul pulling bloody strings; a cast of menacing thugs, corrupt shysters, misleading suspects: What else is new? Not much, except the author. Once a player in the O.J. Simpson follies, now a fictioneer, Christopher Darden commits a police procedural with lots of police and little procedure. Who murdered TV’s tabloid queen and where? Who is leaking information and disinformation? Will the villain’s mole be found in the LAPD or in the district attorney’s office, where Nicolette Hill has just been named the D.A.’s special assistant?

Darden’s collusion with a more seasoned mysterymonger, Dick Lochte, hasn’t helped much. The duo’s writing is uninspired, the action uninspiring. On the other hand, forensic detail flows freely, deceit abounds, dirty tricks flourish, public and private fraudulence are stoked by highly paid spin doctors and “stealth scumbags” who specialize in digging up dirt to smear over opponents’ faces. The only character whom Nikki Hill can trust is her large black Belgian sheep dog. But she perseveres, despite her own cache of dirt and guilt, past many misdirections, until the villain is run to ground. In the end, Nikki and a couple of decent cops get the fornicator. Except that in the book they use another word. All is well.

More airport reading from Gregg Main, whose new whodunit is about who’ll do whom. It begins when Ellen leaves her husband, Pete, because he was unfaithful (a term largely irrelevant when there’s no faith to keep) and continues through Pete’s dogged search for her, which takes him from Dallas to L.A. and ends in the equally wild wilds of New Mexico. It turns out that Ellen’s fugue had less to do with infidelity than with long-standing fantasies of revenge for loss and grief inflicted on her long before.

As Ellen tracks down her father’s murderer, she is in turn stalked by her quarry, while Pete strenuously unravels a rather predictable skein of deceit. Competently told, the story keeps one reading. The mystery of Main’s tale lies, however, less in the identity of Ellen’s final target than in the revelation of semi-detached marriage: how apparently affectionate spouses can share bed, bathroom, tax returns, even the microwave over the years without revealing their innermost obsessions. Communication here is about incidentals, not essentials; and Ellen bonds with a man she began pursuing as casually as she resumes marital relations from which she had disengaged.

Perhaps Main is right and chance, not choice, rules the psyche. Relations that are shallow and insubstantial deserve no more attention than they get. But then, the covers of the books in which such tales are told could lie closer together with no great loss.

This could apply to John le Carre’s latest, “Single & Single,” which has sold well in England despite indifferent reviews. The American version, out this month, will probably sell well on the strength of name recognition and fond memories of George Smiley. But spying ain’t what it used to be in the good old Cold War days, and le Carre’s artful dodgers have transferred their dodges to more trendy realms like money laundering and other commercial criminalities.

The blurb describes the book’s opening as a stunning set piece. I found it a discouraging sludge. Readers who make it past those pages will recognize a mood as dark as in the old days but will miss the thrills. Because they are criminal, family relations are less trivial than in Main’s “Every Trace,” but characters are less engaging, pace is paralyzed by surrealist intrusions and, though there’s enough transcontinental gadding to gladden a travel agent’s heart, the suspense drags out. Thrillers are less about thrills than about passive enjoyment of action, like watching football on television. Here there are too many timeouts; pace and suspense can’t keep up, because diffuseness and waffle get in the way.

It is a relief after so much humbug to enjoy the work of a practiced professional. Ruth Rendell no longer counts the books she has published or the awards they have won, but her novels continue to give readers their money’s worth.

Situated in England and spun with consummate craftsmanship, Rendell’s latest tale recalls the interwoven helix of DNA, whose strands are inseparable while fatidically unique. Almost all her characters are somehow impaired, emotionally handicapped, deprived, or twisted or fragilized because they have been traumatized or stupefied, cocooned or ignored, have known too much excitement or none, have been starved of affection or drowned in purported care. Yet Rendell knows and lets her readers know that victimhood is not destiny: Some characters rise above trammels; others abandon themselves or choke on them.

Critically injured by a brutal experience in her childhood, Rendell’s heroine is an attractive young woman, a little lacking in the preservative asperities that keep wolves from the door, but otherwise engaging. Affective deprivation, on the other hand, produces a morally autistic antihero devoid of any sentiments except the most self-serving. These two, and the characters that revolve around them, are presented as multidimensional, often irritating but seldom predictable and never flat or boring. It is a tribute to psychological integrity and to a style that is true to life that when the handsome amoral killer falls down a self-dug trap and quietly dies there, as monsters sometimes do in fairy tales, we accept the resolution as realistic. A satisfying and compelling read.