L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

“In the Clear” is a howl. Steve Lopez probably overdoes the hilariousness, but reading him is too much fun to notice, let alone to mind.

A Times columnist, Lopez introduces us to Albert La Rosa, sheriff of a small town, Harbor Light, on the New Jersey shore, where independent fishermen have been squeezed out by conglomerates and where local storekeepers waste away, pressured by Bargain Acres, which bills itself as the largest retail space under one roof in North America.

Bored from a diet of nothing-much-doing, Albert is middle-aged, graying at the edges, tired round the eyes, weary of playing it safe. Then he’s offered a job as chief of security at a new casino to be built in town and all hell breaks loose. The prospect of Atlantic City moving in splits the little town. Albert’s friends turn against him. His father, proud owner of “La Rosa’s Hardware & More, Service With Pride Since 1950,” practically disowns him. The woman he planned to marry, who runs an eatery, “Peg’s As You Like It,” named after her mother, walks out on him.

Shots are fired, cars blown up, Bargain Acres goes up in flames, death threats and an actual death disrupt the sedative routine of many years, upsetting Albert’s plans, bringing in the FBI (predictably ineffectual) and challenging his cop’s instincts.

The listless world of Harbor Light is vivified but threatened. So is Albert. Will his sister’s warning that there are no fresh starts in life, just new opportunities to screw up, prove right? No chance. Albert fends off both filthy lucre and his rutted groove to solve the mysteries and live as a free spirit. The casino is fended off, corporate retail recedes, the town revives. And Albert recaptures his girl.

“Courting Trouble” is Lisa Scottoline’s latest romp and demonstration of wordplay. Anne Murphy, a smart, good-looking redheaded lawyer, has fled L.A. to get away from a murderous stalker, Kevin Satorno. Neither a restraining order nor police helped protect her when, at her door, the evil nut had pulled a gun on her.

With Kevin in prison, but only for two years on a charge of aggravated assault, Anne had put the country between them, changed her life, changed jobs to an all-female law firm in Philadelphia where she lives with Mel, a multipersonality cat. She’s trying an important case and doing well with it. Then Kevin escapes from prison, and all’s to do again.

When a young woman who is cat-sitting Mel is cut down with a sawed-off shotgun in Anne’s unlighted hallway, police and the media assume that the disfigured corpse is Anne. Anne lets them assume to save her life as well as her job, because she doesn’t want to fall down on the case she’s trying (her colleagues learn that Anne is still very much alive and in the game): an allegation of sexual harassment that could ruin her client.

It’s the Fourth of July weekend. Undermanned and overstretched, Philadelphia police are not much help. It’s left to Anne and her law firm partners to run the erotomaniac into the ground. They do and Kevin is disposed of; but silly Anne cannot “help wishing it hadn’t ended with such an awful death.”

She gets her wish, because things are not as simple as they seem--all of which makes for a fast-moving and suspenseful thriller, cheerful, charming, ditsy, a bit contrived, frequently funny and a good read. Lots of detail about clothes, lots of detail about interpersonal relations, lots of detail about details. If it weren’t un-PC to say so, I’d say it was a girl thing.

Classicists among our readers should enjoy Jose Carlos Somoza’s “The Athenian Murders.” They may even savor its scholarly apparatus: the goofy, semi-spoofy footnotes that turn a mystery about mysteries into a running maze of conundrums.

In Athens in the 5th century BC, Tramachus, son of the widow Itys (“He was a boy.... His gaze was pure”) is found in the night, mauled as if by wolves. That’s what the Athenian physician concludes, and the captain of the Guard concurs. But the lad had been a student in Plato’s Academy and one of his teachers, Diagoras, not satisfied by the dismissal of a victim whose “soul seemed as if burnished by Athena herself,” turns to a local detective: the short, fat “Decipherer of Enigmas” Heracles Pontor, whose investigation draws the two men into a noxious web of intrigue and leads to further grisly killings of other youths, Tramachus’ companions. No thanks to his friends, Heracles winkles out the mystery and the louche mysteries that surround it: Dionysian rituals, sacrificial cults, torn-out hearts and the asininity of scholars.

But “The Athenian Murders” is also a reworking of Euripides’ 2,400-year-old “Bacchae,” the post-classical takeoff of a gory play in which an insistently rational Platonist and a positivist detective face covert devotees of the god Dionysus, wonky worshipers and dangerous fanatics all prey to infectious delusions that leave torn corpses behind. So here’s a fable for cognoscenti, a flummery that you can take at face value (which is fun) or parse for allusions, a fiction designed to show off the author’s talents but one that, if you read on, you won’t forget.