L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

We open with reading appropriate to the summer: not exactly serene but more pleasant than paranoiac.

In Laura Van Wormer’s “Expose,” a reporter on a small-town Connecticut newspaper stumbles into an opportunity to do just what the title says for a high-end magazine and to move into the big leagues with it. The main plot turns about the development of the expose and the relationship between Sally, the reporter, and the woman on whom she is expected to do a hatchet job but won’t because both Sally and her quarry are too nice. Other stories interweave: about being orphaned, about women and their feelings, about men and their being weird or perhaps just unfathomable, about the lifestyles of the rich and famous, murder, arson, explosions; and about two love affairs running almost neck and neck, until one pulls ahead of the other.

Sally is engaging, and so are most of the other characters, even the villains. But Sally is irritating too, when she disregards both her job and the chance of a better one in order to pursue her infatuations. No wonder that her mother tells her to grow up and quit fooling around. Telephones and assorted dogs play a role almost as large as do amours. So does a nice nut called Crazy Pete, and so does fear of sexually transmitted diseases (herpes, VD, AIDS and the rest). Yet everything is painless, diverting, relaxed and it comes right in the end when Sally quits fooling around. She may grow up yet, but there is no hurry.

Barry Maitland is a London Scot who teaches in Australia. His “Marx Sisters” is cleverly devious, sagaciously cunning and ultimately reassuring when most mysteries set out to destabilize. Three old sisters live on a homey eccentric London street, Jerusalem Lane. First one, then a second, is found dead. The ladies are great-granddaughters of Karl Marx, and there are plenty of motives for their elimination. The sisters’ home stands in the way of a multimillion gentrification project, their hoard of Marx books and papers is coveted by booksellers and scholars and their inheritance would do a lot of good to an impatient and unsavory heir.

As Detective Kathy Kola and Detective Chief Inspector David Brock follow first one trail and then another, the nuances of criminal investigation British-style affirm their differences from ours, but social experience seems not much different. “First marriages are doomed these days,” sighs Brock. “Do you know any first marriages you would want to be in?” Kathy has to agree. And so it goes, through mazes of pensive civility, until Kathy solves what one moment before had looked like a case already solved. Brock had been wrong: Things that begin badly do not necessarily end that way. Intricate and crafty, Maitland’s first mystery is a pleasure to read. It looks as if Kola and Brock have a long shelf-life ahead of them.

On the literary plane, British crime and crime-hunting look positively cozy when compared to their American counterparts. Brits reserve the sleaze for their spy stories, stuffed to the gills with high-fiber scabrousness. In that spooky realm, where two and two are seldom four, island spy-spinners know no master.

Gerald Seymour has been advancing quickstep in the tracks of Len Leighton and John le Carre, and “Dead Ground” serves up another desperate tragicomedy of a post-Cold War era in which everybody loses and prizes turn to rubbish in their hands. Reflecting new conditions, the glum poetry of Cold War spy work has become positively mournful, and Seymour’s fiction faithfully reflects this. This is no longer the Great Game of yore--not even the dirty game familiar to aficionadoes of the genre. It has become a despicable, filthy game in which the cynical British court rich Germans, the Germans lick American boots and everyone tries hard to conceal the corrupt murderers with whom they go to bed.

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East Germany’s dread State Security wing, the Stasi, was heir of the Gestapo and of the KGB who trained its people and on whose achievements they improved. Nowadays, superannuated Stasis vegetate or go into organized crime or sell their know-what to the highest bidder. In this particular case, the British, while picking crumbs under Allied tables, meet with a contretemps. After delivering a lecture at a British army base, Dr. Dieter Krause, an ex-Stasi scumbag, is unexpectedly aggressed by a young woman corporal, Tracy Barnes. It turns out that years before, the German had been responsible for the murder of Tracy’s German boyfriend, who spied for the Brits. If her accusations prove true, Krause, the Germans’ asset, would lose his trade value and his new-found hopes, his minders would lose credit with the Pentagon waiting to pump him, the British would lose credit with the Germans and Russian friends would be revealed for the clowns they are.

In Seymour’s amorality tale, Tracy is joined by an old intelligence operative, John Mantle, and they set out to prove her accusation. While invisible hands pull strings all around, the odd couple blunder from failure to failure, and their misadventures lay bare the aftermath of Socialism in our time, the grimy paws of democracy’s defenders and the irrelevance of once-respected values. Hell-bent on revenge, flawed Tracy is a pain; Mantle, who tries to live by principle, is a drag. The wrong kind of page-turners, perhaps deliberately so, the long, tedious lectures he delivers on principle and history bore the young woman and the reader too. One wants to put down the book and walk away from the action, but the book holds on, insists, grips and won’t let go. In the end, of course, everyone loses and everyone is alone, feeling as flat as some bitter beers, except for the reader who gets the disenchantment that was paid for: a dour money’s worth.