The dead of summer /

SOONER OR LATER, a historical crime novel is bound to drag you down some dark alley and into the nastiest, most lawless precincts of the period. Jean Zimmerman followed this tradition in her first novel, "The Orphanmaster," a descent into the hellish criminal haunts of 17th-century New Amsterdam. In SAVAGE GIRL (Viking, $27.95), this canny author puts all that aside and turns to the Gilded Age for a sweeping narrative, set within the cloistered ranks of high society in 19th-century Manhattan, that raises touchy questions about what it means to be civilized. Even in this exclusive world, the Delegate family is more privileged than most. The paterfamilias, Friedrich-August-Heinrich (also known as Freddy), has taken his family and a retinue of servants on his private, sumptuously appointed 12-car railroad train to Virginia City, Nev., to visit the silver mine that's boosting his already considerable fortune. But when the Delegates depart from this brawling Wild West boom town, they have an additional passenger, a beautiful, feral young woman from a land that's "savage, wild, forsaken by God and man" - who's said to have been raised by wolves. Found at a side-show, she'll be the ideal experimental subject, Freddy thinks, for the nature-or-nurture debate roiling his intellectual set. Using Freddy's intelligent but decidedly peculiar son Hugo as narrator adds another layer of suspense to the story. A student of anatomy at Harvard, this young man has an unhealthy fondness for knives and a vivid imagination when it comes to Bronwyn, as the "Savij Girl" comes to be known. But who's to say where imagination leaves off and obsession takes over, once the family is back in its Fifth Avenue mansion and the "Pygmalion"-like process of civilizing Bronwyn (who keeps her own set of razor-like steel claws and creeps out of the house to visit the wild animals at the zoo) begins in earnest. The wondrous sights Zimmerman rolls out for us - a picnic on the banks of the Great Salt Lake, a stopover at the "fabulous, glorious" Palmer House hotel in Chicago and visits to mansions up and down the East Coast - are all the more piquant when Bronwyn's admirers begin turning up, cut to ribbons, at almost every whistle stop. If this is civilization, bring on the wolves. ALWAYS SURPRISING and never dull. That's the bottom line on Michael Robotham's psychological suspense novels, which star a sympathetic clinical psychologist named Joe O'Loughlin and feature the walking wounded on his challenging client list. Currently on the couch in WATCHING YOU (Mulholland/Little Brown, $26) is Marnie Logan, who's been in a state of "existential anxiety" for a little over a year, ever since her husband disappeared. Crushed by bills and unable to draw on his accounts, collect his insurance or pay off his gambling debts, Marnie hasn't the smarts or the gumption to fight off the predators making life miserable for her and her two demanding children. What Marnie doesn't know is that she has a stalker, a creepy guardian angel who's been watching over her ever since she was a child. But when her tormentors are murdered one by one, it's Marnie, not her secret sharer, who becomes the prime suspect. Only O'Loughlin, fighting his own demons, seems to have the compassion to work with such a fatalistic victim. The plot is so twisted and the psychology so perverse, even the most alert reader might misread the clues. But don't feel bad. O'Loughlin doesn't get it entirely right either. IT'S HARD TO KEEP TRACK of all the detectives and their significant others in Mari Jungstedt's Swedish mysteries, which are set on Gotland, a picturesque but forbidding island in the Baltic Sea. Detective Superintendent Anders Knutas, one of those dedicated career cops who validate the genre credentials of procedural mysteries, is clearly the top investigator. Johan Berg, a TV reporter, is more of a pest than a bona fide sleuth. And then there's Knutas's deputy, Karin Jacobsson, who takes the lead in THE DEAD OF SUMMER (Stockholm Text, paper, $14.95), while the boss is vacationing in Denmark. Despite her weak stomach at gross crime scenes - as when a bullet-riddled corpse is found floating in the sea by two schoolboys, who swim right into it - Jacobsson is a competent and likable police officer. More critically, she's true to herself, to the point of resolving this terribly sad case in a way that not even Knutas would dare. I BEND MY KNEE to any hard-boiled male author with the sang-froid to note that a woman's French pedicure is shot through with "tiny crystal inlays that glittered like shattered glass at the scene of an accident." That kind of imagery comes naturally to Loren D. Estleman, who can't be unmanned by a pretty piece of writing. His latest Amos Walker mystery, DON'T LOOK FOR ME (Forge/Tom Doherty, $26.99), is SO old-school, with its world-weary private eye, cynical villains and sultry dames, that it's new again. The slick plot sends Walker on a wild-goose chase after an investment banker's missing wife, a health nut who goes around with so many bottles of vitamin pills that "her purse rattled like a used car." But the case takes a sinister turn when the lady's source of supplements turns out to be selling heroin, not herbs. Given the markup on vitamins, the heroin sounds like a bargain.

In her fifth Anders Knutas procedural (following Killer's Art, 2013), Jungstedt once again explores life on the remote islands of Sweden's Gotland province. Due to an all-too-rare vacation for the superintendent, Deputy Detective Karin Jacobsson is in charge when construction manager Peter Bovide is murdered at a seaside campsite. The victim is a faithful husband and father of two young children, and there's nothing on the surface to explain why someone would want to fire a round of bullets into his abdomen. Could he have gotten on the wrong side of the undocumented workers he'd been hiring from the Baltics? Jacobsson ably organizes her colleagues on the police force, while trying to constrain recurring character journalist Johan Berg. Short chapters chronicling the investigation are interspersed with the parallel story of German sisters who, as teenagers, visited Sweden's remote Gotska Sandon Island in 1985. Sadly, only one sister left the island alive. Another solid addition to the growing canon of Swedish crime drama, in the grand tradition of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.--Keefe, Karen Copyright 2014 Booklist

Add Jungstedt to the list of Scandinavian crime writers proficient at creating a dark mood for a complex whodunit featuring characters with genuine depth. In her fifth featuring Visby Det. Supt. Anders Knutas (after 2010's The Killer's Art), Karin Jacobsson, his newly promoted deputy, starts a complex inquiry into a murder committed while Knutas is on holiday. Peter Bovide, the owner of a small construction company, has been camping on the island of Faro with his wife and children. One morning, Bovide fails to return from his regular morning jog, and his bullet-ridden body, including multiple stomach shots after one to the head, turns up shortly afterward. The overkill suggests a personal motive for the killing, but none is easily detectible. Jungstedt has a talent for turning a phrase-the widow's despair over her loss is so strong that "it actually made the air hard to breathe." The twists perfectly combine surprise and logic. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.