Missing: a church, a thing with feathers, and a brain
In Jane Langton's ''Steeplechase," Harvard professor and historian Homer Kelly has surprised everyone, including himself, by writing a bestseller. His publisher is hot for him to repeat the stunt, so Homer and his wife, Mary, get to work, researching the mystery of a missing church.
Cut to just after the Civil War, and the reader is jettisoning ballast and rising in a hot-air balloon with photographer brothers Jake and Jack Spratt, who are counting steeples and dropping leaflets advertising their services. The pair specialize in aerial views, cartes de visite, and mortuaire images (pictures of the recently deceased).
Beneath them, the bucolic town of Nashoba (New Englanders will recognize Concord, Mass.) is anything but peaceful. Soldier James Shaw has returned from the war to his wife and family, grievously maimed and embittered. Two ministers, orthodox Horatio Biddle and progressive Josiah Gideon, are at each other's throats over the ideas of Charles Darwin. Biddle insists Darwin has replaced ''Adam and Eve with ludicrous hairy beasts." And at the center of this strife stand a majestic, centuries-old chestnut tree and a rambunctious, 5-year-old boy.
With a sure hand, a dose of whimsy, and a heavy sprinkling of wry humor, Langton weaves her spell, shuttling deftly between past and present. Every character in this formidable cast is complex and believable. There's also suspense, murder, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes making a guest appearance. There's even a breathtaking, ''Rocky"-like climax, and a surprising revelation when Homer, Mary, and the reader solve the riddle of the missing church.
On to a missing bird. ''The Conjurer's Bird," by Martin Davies, also shifts between past and present and has a fusty academic as its protagonist.
Fitz, a burnt-out professor of natural sciences and taxidermist, receives a visit from famed collector Karl Anderson, offering $50,000 for help finding the ''Mysterious Bird of Ulieta." The only specimen ever seen was captured and cataloged during Captain James Cook's second voyage to the South Seas. It later found its way into the collection of 18th-century naturalist Sir Joseph Banks. Soon thereafter, the bird vanished. Fitz considers its disappearance ''one of Nature's conjuring tricks," leaving researchers ''looking for feathers."
Initially wary of heroic quests -- his grandfather, also a naturalist, was nearly driven mad in the course of searching for an African peacock -- Fitz finds his interest piqued when it becomes apparent that others are pursuing the missing bird. Obviously, more than academic enlightenment is at stake. He enlists the help of Katya, a student who boards in his house. Determined to hoodwink their rivals and save the only evidence of a vanished species, Fitz and Katya embark on a race that takes them into the bowels of museums and libraries and to small villages across England.
The novel frequently shifts to the 18th century, revealing the story of Banks, the adventurer and naturalist from whose collection the bird disappeared. Intriguing bits of historical past -- Cook's expedition, during which the real Ulieta bird was captured and preserved; the search for an African peacock; and Banks's love affair with a woman known to history only as ''Miss B"-- are interwoven and embroidered upon in this richly textured tale, part mystery and part romance, one that should appeal to bird fanciers with a taste for history and puzzles.
In ''Jar City," Arnaldur Indridason's police procedural, which has been translated into British English by Bernard Scudder, the story flashes back a mere three decades, and what's gone missing is a brain. The setting is unremittingly gray, rainy Reykjavík; the emotionally flat protagonist, Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson, is very much in the great tradition of dyspeptic, taciturn fictional police detectives. He has an ex-wife and a son whom he never sees. His daughter, Eva Lind, is a drug addict who shows up to cadge money off him. Otherwise, Erlendur's life is his work, and dinner consists of a ''ready meal" warmed in the microwave.
Erlendur is called to a squalid flat to investigate the murder of a 70-year-old man named Holberg, killed by a blow to the head. Slowly, with the help of his colleagues, Erlendur uncovers the man's sordid past. A thug and petty criminal, 30 years earlier Holberg got away with a particularly vicious rape. His victim became pregnant. The child, a little girl named Audur, died at the age of 7 from what was thought to be a rare type of brain tumor.
Erlendur becomes obsessed with Audur, a daughter Holberg never knew, convinced that the pathology of whatever killed her holds the key to Holberg's murder. The ''Jar City" of the title is a fabled room where hospital teaching faculty stored human organs of particular interest to researchers. Erlendur's investigation turns into a quest to find the glass jar that contains Audur's brain. Meanwhile, his own daughter re-enters his life, pregnant and bringing chaos with her.
This is a dark, haunting novel, with a protagonist who searches for a murderer and finds his own humanity. The emotionally wrought ending caught me off guard, and touched me in a way that few mystery novels do.
Hallie Ephron is author of ''Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel: How to Knock 'Em Dead With Style." She can be reached through www.hallieephron.com. 
