NOTHING LIKE A FEW NICE MURDERS AFTER WORK

Author: By Robin W. Winks

Date: SUNDAY, April 26, 1998

Page: L3

Section: Books

Ever since John D. MacDonald launched his Travis McGee series in the early 1960s, and then cut McGee off in ``The Lonely Silver Rain'' in 1985, I have been looking for someone to take McGee's place. (This confession will reveal much about my tastes to those who know McGee; not everything thus revealed is commendable.) Until now I have not found anyone up to the task, much jacket hyperbole notwithstanding. Now I believe I have, in Charles Knief's ``Sand Dollars'' (St. Martin's Press, $23.95). This crisp, convincing novel about a scam, a disappearing husband, and some of the most vicious young punks ever served up in the genre introduced me to John Caine, who is accustomed to live on a boat near Honolulu, not Fort Lauderdale, as McGee did, and who resists the temptations of therapeutic sex a tad longer than McGee was inclined to do, but who is cut cleanly from the same cloth. There are some tautly described sequences: a rescue of three stupid scuba divers, a confrontation on a deserted development lot south of Tijuana, the defense of a home in San Diego. There are numerous just-right turns of ironic phrase. One can see old Travis McGee looking on as Caine does what a man has to do, pleased to see that at last he has a successor.

Stuart Woods also is pretty good at describing what it feels like to drown, and ``Swimming to Catalina'' (HarperCollins, $24) is his best book since ``Santa Fe Rules,'' eight books back. The title is from Raymond Chandler -- cross the mob and you'll be swimming to Catalina with a streetcar on your back -- and so is the tone, and while Woods is a good step back of Chandler stylistically, who is to notice during a late-night read? The book begins with Stone Barrington swimming to Catalina and then accounts for why he should be in such a predicament; it's all about corruption in Southern California and turns upon the murder of a sleazy filmmaker who lives in a gated community in Bel Air, and almost no one is to be trusted, which is good preparation for a departmental meeting over at the university.

Nor can the reader trust anyone in Loren D. Estleman's ``The Witchfinder'' (Mysterious Press, $23), except, of course, for the wisecracking P.I. Amos Walker, who if we've ever read an Estleman before, we know will reach a gritty triumph in the end. A famous architect, believed to be dying, hires Walker to find out who created a telling lie, to find the witch who, by faking a photograph, destroyed the only true love affair the architect ever had. Walker does what he is good at, following the dots, to photographers, cops, lawyers, other architects, and the women in the case, until in the end he does what he was hired to do, and everything ends in a blaze of gunfire. It's all a bit predictable, and perhaps the more enjoyable for that.

Sue Grafton is also predictable, and unfortunately becoming more so, as she pads her books out with irrelevant descriptive detail. In ``N Is for Noose'' (Henry Holt, $25), her series figure Kinsey Millhone takes on the seemingly simple task of finding out why a small-town policeman high up in the Owens Valley of California was so apparently disturbed and preoccupied in the weeks before his death from a heart attack. The telling of the story is taut, in that the detailed record of tiny acts is piled up so cunningly as to seem hypnotic even when inherently of no interest at all. Millhone is more neurotic than usual here, and we see more of her phobias; she is like a fish out of water high in the Sierra valleys, away from her beloved Santa Teresa (for which read Santa Barbara), and she gets into deep trouble for not asking an obvious question or two -- well, obvious to a reader, but I suppose you have to be there -- and walks into harm's way while we shout at her to wake up. Grafton has a compulsion to report whenever Millhone pees (her word). Yet precisely because we like her and her blue-collar appetite for Big Macs and lonely roads, we stay the course.

Ed McBain has long stayed the course with his 87th Precinct series, and his less frequently visited Calusa, Fla., where lawyer Matthew Hope pursues criminals and, often, sex. In ``The Last Best Hope'' (Warner Books, $24), which promises to be the last Hope novel and is not, alas, the best, McBain shows us just how to steal a treasure -- the cup from which Socrates drank the hemlock -- from an art gallery. McBain is especially good at dialogue, and cross-cutting between various protagonists in ways that keep a reader compulsively turning the pages. Here he has the interesting idea of having Hope call upon Steve Carella of the 87th Precinct for help, so that fans of either series have a little something to take pleasure in. This is an ideal book to read the night one completes the annual entreaty to the IRS, for like a good martini, it is dry enough to give one hope for the next contest.