IT'S HARD TO get good help these days. That's the complaint of the stressed-out Glaswegian gangsters in EVERY NIGHT I DREAM OF HELL (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26), a piece of writing that lives up to its gritty title. It's especially difficult to find disciplined professionals like Nate Colgan, an enforcer for the Jamieson gang and the reliable chronicler of Malcolm Mackay's novel. Although he's skilled at handling the dirty jobs, Nate is no meathead. "Times had changed," he explains. "Big organizations had become more sophisticated and the standard of muscle had gone up." But with Peter Jamieson in prison, the wheels seem to be coming off his efficient machine. Between the assassination of business associates like Lee Christie and takeover threats from ambitious insiders like Angus Lafferty, it's clear to Nate that "the old boss, and the old certainties, were gone" and the leadership is up for grabs. "The problem," in his opinion, is "gunmen. Hard to pick up a good one" and impossible to make a permanent hire, given the sorry state of the organization. It's in this atmosphere of unrest (some might call it chaos) that Nate is elevated to the role of "security consultant" and charged with keeping a lid on Adrian Barrett, an English mobster escorted into town by Nate's former lover, Zara Cope, in order to poach on local turf. It's a joy to wallow in the muck with Mackay, who writes in a bold style that reflects confidence rather than bravado, occasionally breaking up the tension with a wry joke. (His definition of a "paranoid crew" of hit men: "two to do the work and two to check up on the two doing the work.") And he isn't afraid to show Nate at his violent worst because he knows that, like Zara, we can't get enough of this morally complex antihero. Nate survives by believing himself to be a good man in a bad job, a rationalization Zara brushes off. "The rest of the world knows you're the bad guy," she says, "the man that the beasts are scared of." There's a reason Nate can't sleep at night: "The only world darker than the one I lived in was the one I slept in." WHO BETTER TO WRITE a mystery about a transgender woman with identity issues than a transgender woman with identity issues? Jennifer Finney Boylan has designed LONG BLACK VEIL (Crown, $25) as a whodunit - an existential whodunit about living with all your selves. The story opens in 1980 at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, a "medieval-looking" pile, long abandoned and thus a tempting destination for some college friends looking for an adventure. The fun wears thin when someone locks them in and ceases altogether when they realize one of them is missing. To the author, the prison is more than a setting, it's also a powerful symbol for the closeted life she once led. There are two transgender characters in this novel, and one of them can save an old friend from suspicion of murder when the body of that missing student is found years later, in 2015. But in order to do so, she'll have to acknowledge the closely guarded secret of her past life, a revelation she fears will alienate her husband and destroy her marriage. Although Boy Ian's awkward handling of the two time frames depletes the tension, she has a good grip on the dynamics of her narrator's current and past selves and the battle to keep them from fighting to the death. WE KNOW THAT authors get attached to their series heroes, but this is ridiculous! John Sandford has already written 26 novels about Lucas Davenport, and by now you'd think they'd be sick of each other. But no. In GOLDEN PREY (Putnam, $29), Sandford has come up with yet another career move for his superslick action hero, who started out as a lowly cop in Minneapolis and quickly advanced to more demanding posts. Here Lucas has left his stressful job with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and is doing some interesting undercover work as a marshal. It's the perfect career move for this high flyer, who is being groomed for a future political detail. But for now, he's on the trail of a career criminal who had the nerve to rob a Honduran drug cartel. Good luck with that. THERE'S A DANISH word, ravnemodre, that translates as "raven mother" and refers to bad mothers. Ella Nygaard, the 28year-old protagonist of WHAT MY BODY REMEMBERS (Soho Crime, $25.95), is considered such a woman. Because of debilitating panic attacks, she can't seem to hold down a job, get off the dole or provide a decent home for her young son. No wonder. As a child, Ella watched her father kill her mother and was so traumatized she grew up full of rage. But for all that, Ella is no ravnemodre. When her son is taken away from her, she kidnaps him and flees to her grandmother's vacant cottage on the North Sea. But she's not safe in this village, where strangers ask too many questions and frighten her into revisiting the secrets of her brutal childhood. In this sensitive character study (translated by Lindy Falk van Rooyen), Agnete Friis, who writes the Nina Borg mysteries with Lene Kaaberbol, dares us to confront our prejudices against bad mothers and other outcasts. MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

Near the start of Thriller Award-winner Sandford's solid 27th Lucas Davenport novel (after 2016's Extreme Prey), holdup man Garvin Poole and his gang hit a dope counting-house in Biloxi, Miss. During the robbery, Poole fatally shoots four drug dealers and one of their granddaughters, a six-year-old girl. Davenport, a former Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension official who's now a U.S. marshal with the freedom to take on any case he wants anywhere in the country, decides to go after Poole. Davenport assembles all available information on Poole, his family, his associates, and his girlfriend. Meanwhile, Luis Soto, "a bad man [who] liked being a bad man," and torture specialist Charlene Kort are working on behalf of the robbed drug boss; Davenport gets a sample of Soto and Kort's handiwork when he finds Poole's parents brutally slain at their home in La Vergne, Tenn. Sandford's trademark blend of rough humor and deadly action keeps the pages turning until the smile-inducing wrap-up, which reveals the fates of a number of his quirky, memorable characters. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Garvin Poole is a shooter and a thief. Sturgill Darling is a spotter. He tracks big-dollar opportunities that a guy like Garvin can exploit, and he's spotted a score in Biloxi, Mississippi. A South American drug cartel is moving bales of cash out of a Biloxi shipyard that was ruined by Hurricane Katrina, but the cartel's soldiers have grown careless. When Gar and Sturgill strike, five lie dead along with one child. The take is millions. Lucas Davenport has used his political connections to secure a job with the U.S. Marshals. With a blank check, he can do what he does best: hunt in this case, for Gar and Sturgill. But he has competition: two cartel thugs, Luis Soto and Charlene Kort. Luis is a stone-cold killer, but Charlene is something else: she likes working with power tools to get relatives to talk. When someone's sawing off your leg with a Black and Decker, one tends to say whatever is needed to make it stop. The twenty-ninth Prey novel is a very good, straightforward chase thriller, laced with gallows humor throughout.--Lukowsky, Wes Copyright 2017 Booklist