Tortured tough guys, and the distaff side of suspense

William G. Tapply writes about fly fishing so seductively in "Bitch Creek" that even I, who have the attention span of a gnat, wanted to drive up to the little tidal creek he describes emptying into Casco Bay, .nd the stripers in "some nervous water along the edge of the eelgrass in the shallow water," and begin false-casting, whatever that is.

The novel contains a dandy mystery; but even more, it's a story of .shing and love (in that order), featuring Stonewall Jackson Calhoun, a guy who rivals "Madison County" 's Robert Kincaid for hunk appeal.

Stoney is an enigmatic hero who woke up six years ago in a VA hospital, his memory zapped by a lightning strike.

Unable to remember who he is, he's overloaded with disconnected memories and disquieting .ashes of déjà vu.

After months of rehab, he heads to Maine, a check for $25,000 and a credit card in his pocket, and the promise of income for life. No one will tell him what he's done to deserve such largesse, and he doesn't press. Luscious Kate Balaban, part Irish, part Penobscot Indian, offers him a job in her bait-and-tackle store, and takes him into her bed. He's a contented man who wants to be left alone to "suck some marrow out of his new life."

All goes well until a man Stoney writes off as a blowhard shows up at the shop looking for a guide to help him find a fishing creek. Stoney doesn't suffer fools, and foists the flatlander off on his friend Lyle McMahan. McMahan doesn't return from the .shing trip. When Stoney .nds McMahan murdered, he feels personally responsible. Aided by a photographic memory and a strong sixth sense, he sets out to .nd the killer. He discovers, much to his surprise, that he knows exactly how to proceed with a murder investigation.

This novel starts a new series for Tapply (full disclosure: he blurbed an earlier novel of mine), the author of the Brady Coyne series. The ending left me yearning to know more about Stoney's past.

I'll just have to wait for the next series entry for answers.

Terry Orr, the protagonist of Jim Fusilli's fourth series novel, "Hard, Hard City," wishes he could forget his past. Six years ago he was a successful writer and father of two. Then his infant son's stroller rolled off a subway platform and his wife dove after it. Both died under a train.

Tortured by their deaths and by the discovery of his wife's in.delity, Terry has a chip on his shoulder the size of Staten Island. Explosive anger and determination not to become a victim himself propel the story forward, modulated only by his relationship with his daughter, Bella. The teenager is as sassy as they come, and understands her father like no one else.

Working now as a PI, Terry agrees to search for Bella's missing classmate, Allie Powell. Talented 14-year-old Allie has a thug for a father and a narcissist for a mother, neither of whom has reported him missing. They seem more interested in finding documents that were taken from Allie's uncle's safe just before the boy disappeared. Because Fusilli is so good at everything else, I swallowed a coincidence that gives Terry a reason for pursuing the documents as well as the kid.

There's no shortage of action in this novel. Early in his quest, Terry gets beaten, has his head stomped, and is driven off the road. The gangsters he tangles with have even bigger chips on their shoulders than he does. Fortunately, he's got a soft side, too. How can you not like a guy who calls his daughter's answering machine just to hear her laugh?

If you're looking to sample the crime fiction by women writers, you can't do better than "A Moment on the Edge: 100 Years of Crime Stories by Women."

Last year I chaired the short story committee for the Edgar Awards and waded through 478 submissions to .nd the pearls. So it was a distinct pleasure to read this anthology of 26 stories, every one a gem. It includes giants of the golden age of mystery in the United Kingdom like Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham; also American authors like Marcia Muller and Sara Paretsky, who crashed the all-boy party in the United States, where, until the 1960s, the genre was dominated by tough-guy writers of first-person narratives.

I can imagine editor Elizabeth George smiling wickedly as she chose "A Jury of Her Peers," by Susan Glaspell, published in 1917, to open the volume. In it, two women discover the truth among what the small-town sheriff and his cronies dismiss as "insigni.cant kitchen things" at a murder scene. It's the women who decide how to mete out justice.

Nearly a hundred years after it was written, Glaspell's seditious feminist subtext still resonates.

Among my other favorites is Carolyn Wheat's "Ghost Station," a story that takes that cliché of a cop's battle with alcoholism to a new level, using as a backdrop one of New York's fabled abandoned subway platforms.

In a lucid introductory chapter, George ably defines and defends the genre. Why do so many women authors choose to write crime stories? I'd argue that one reason, abundantly evident from this anthology, is that so many of them do it so well.

Hallie Ephron is co-author of the Dr. Peter Zak series of psychological mystery thrillers by G. H. Ephron.