Screenwriter Levien's debut crackles with raw intensity as it hurtles from a placid Indianapolis suburb to a dingy Mexican outpost. Paul and Carol Gabriel are devastated when their 12-year-old son, Jamie, disappears on his paper delivery route one morning. Fourteen months later and with the police no closer to finding Jamie, they hire PI Frank Behr, an imposing ex-cop with a checkered past. Behr soon discovers that Jamie's disappearance was no random grab but part of a larger operation run by Riggi, a real estate tycoon who deals in everything from drugs to stolen children. Reluctantly allowing Paul to accompany him, Behr tracks Riggi's men to Mexico, where he and Paul discover the true extent of Riggi's depravity as they race against the clock to find Jamie. Levien expertly weaves a subplot involving the tragic death of Behr's own young son into the complex kidnapping story, and the moments shared between the two grieving fathers are heartbreaking. Fans of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch will be particularly delighted. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Jamie Gabriel, a 12-year-old, is snatched from the streets of a pleasant Indianapolis suburb as he delivers newspapers. Paul and Carol Gabriel, his parents, are nearly shattered by his disappearance, and 14 months later, enraged by the desultory efforts of the police, they meet private investigator Frank Behr. A knowledgeable former cop who still mourns the death of his own son, Behr offers them little hope but agrees to take the case. Painstaking investigation leads him to one of the kidnappers, but Behr discovers that whatever closure is possible for the Gabriels lies in Mexico. Screenwriter Levien has created a first-rate suspense novel. His characters are vividly and fully realized. Each is given a kind of humanity, from the grieving parents and the loner PI to the dangerous losers who do the kidnapping. The erosion of the parents' marriage as they turn inward is painful but artful. The tension increases page by page. Serial readers of suspense fiction are the target audience here, but readers simply looking for a well-crafted novel will also find much to enjoy.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2007 Booklist

Jamie Gabriel lives in a community where boys still have paper routes; that is, until he and his bike vanish while delivering papers early one morning. His parents, Paul and Carol, report his disappearance to the police, but after a brief search leads nowhere, the authorities move on to other cases. More than a year later, on the advice of one of the deputies, the parents hire private investigator and former cop Frank Behr. Behr brings some baggage to the table; he's divorced, and his son is dead. While he empathizes with the tragedy of not knowing what happened to Jamie, he is hesitant to take the case, warning that closure will undoubtedly be ugly. Tormented by the strain of having a missing child, Paul and Carol each try to cope in their own way, and their marriage suffers for it. Eventually, Paul starts working with Behr, and despite the cold trail, their quest leads them to some very troubling answers and a somewhat predictable ending. Nevertheless, in his fiction debut screenwriter Levien (who cowrote Ocean's Thirteen, Runaway Jury, and Rounders) captures the hopelessness of the situation well, the pacing is relentless, and the story gripping and altogether disturbing. Highly recommended for all fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/07.]--Stacy Alesi, Boca Raton, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

BUCKINGHAM PALACE GARDENS (Ballantine, $26) is Anne Perry's 25th novel featuring her 19thcentury police inspector, Thomas Pitt. But unlike so many detective series gliding on cruise control, this mature work provides a fine introduction to Perry's alluring world of Victorian crime and intrigue. Ever the master of her milieu, she delivers sumptuous descriptions of life among the gentry when England still basked in its imperial glory. And in an intricate plot about a murder at the palace while the Prince and Princess of Wales are in residence, she also marshals the series's major themes: the way crime reverberates throughout the social classes; the precarious status of women of every rank; and the need for honorable heroes to preserve and protect the Empire, sometimes from itself. The glittering centerpiece of Pitt's latest adventure is a formal dinner party attended by the royal couple and their guests, including four entrepreneurs intent on building a railway from Cape Town to Cairo. By the time Perry is finished with the menu, the wives' gowns and the barbed conversations, we've been given subtle insights into every character. The one we care about most is Elsa Dunkeid, the abused but loyal spouse of the most ruthless of the master builders who are seeking the prince's support. Elsa has an independent mind, but because she's no rebel and keeps her intelligence to herself, her views on palace politics seem more authentic than those of the extraordinary protofeminists who tend to dominate Perry's novels. To make her point that the most insignificant life matters, even in the most classbound society, Perry employs an irresistibly appealing "Upstairs, Downstairs" perspective. While the prince and his guests try to explain to Inspector Pitt how the naked body of a prostitute got into a linen closet and bled all over Queen Victoria's own bedclothes, Pitt's clever housemaid, Gracie Phipps, infiltrates the servants' hall, alert to clues that her social superiors might miss. But it isn't young Gracie who is most changed by all this exposure to the powerful elite. It's the idealistic Pitt: "He had still imagined in them a love of the same values as the best of their subjects." Disillusioned by royal reality, he's wiser now, but still committed to restoring order to his imperfect world. The emotional stakes must be high, excruciatingly so, for a suspense novel to maintain its tension, a point obviously understood by David Levien when he wrote CITY OF THE SUN (Doubleday, $24.95). While it deals with the practical mechanics of how a private detective tracks down a boy who has been missing for more than a year, this relentless novel is really about how parents suffer the loss of a child. As such, the story conveys a piercing sense of honesty, even when the investigation itself seems implausibly free of complications. Twelveyearold Jamie Gabriel was snatched off his bike while delivering newspapers in suburban Indianapolis. But after more than a year the trail is "iceage cold," and besides, the police always figured him for a runaway. That leaves his parents, Carol and Paul Gabriel, frozen in a state of grief that begins to thaw only when they hire a former cop, Frank Behr, who lost his own young son in a tragic accident. Scenes are brief and sharp, and there are no stalls in the easy flow of the investigation, which ends with Frank and Paul on a grim road trip to Mexico that also proceeds with remarkably few hitches. But despite all the holes in the plot, the truth of the characters and the intensity of their pain is as unbearably real as it gets. Certain books come to mind whenever that little voice whispers in your ear, "Oh, lighten up!" The mysteries of manners that M. C. Beaton sets in the Cotswolds and laces with the acerbic wit of her village sleuth, Agatha Raisin, are always good for a nasty laugh. Somewhat sweeter, but also restorative, are the "Morgue Mama" whodunits of C. R. Corwin, whose smalltown snoop, the longtime librarian at a Midwestern newspaper, has yet to miss a dirty trick. Louise Penny's series about the eccentric residents of a postcardperfect town in Canada can also be pretty funny. Two relatively new series are putting twists on this impulse to laugh in the face of death. "The Spellman Files" was Lisa Lutz's quirky introduction to Isabel (Izzy) Spellman, dragooned into the family firm by parents who run investigations from their San Francisco home. Izzy returns in CURSE OF THE SPELLMANS (Simon & Schuster, $25) with another breathless tale of comic woe, related through intelligence reports ("Subject Is Observed Digging a Hole"), tape transcripts ("The Stone and Spellman Show Episode 48") and annotated accounts of everything from Izzy's exboyfriends to her arrest history. It's nice to hear such an original voice. AVALANCHE (Simon & Schuster, paper, $14) is Patrick F. McManus's second shaggy dog tale (after "The Blight Way") about Bo Tully, sheriff of Blight County, Idaho, and a good man to have around if you're hunting elk. Bo's current case, tracking down the missing owner of a fancy ski resort, gets tricky when an avalanche traps him inside the resort's lodge with his crazyoldcoot father, an assortment of rowdy guests and maybe a murderer. McManus is a columnist for Outdoor Life and Field & Stream, so it's not surprising to find him setting a pretty nature scene. But his idiosyncratic characters and their lunatic ways are what make this folksy whodunit such fun to curl up with. In Anne Perry's latest Victorian crime novel, a murdered prostitute is found in a linen closet at Buckingham Palace.