• Winter Study. Nevada Barr. Putnam. 370 pages. $24.95.
For much of Barr's 14th Anna Pigeon mystery, it's not a question of who-, why- or howdunit, but of whether a crime has been committed. How can you hold a wild animal guilty?
That animal is a wolf, the subject of a 50-year-old study of wolf-moose relations in Isle Royale National Park off Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Park Ranger Pigeon was stationed here one summer early in her career, but the off-season proves a different world: bitter cold, forlorn isolation. Sharing a single generator are a quartet of devoted researchers and a pair of scientists dispatched by Homeland Security to consider shutting down the study, downsizing research and beefing up security ''to better protect the border from terrorists.'' The atmosphere indoors grows nearly as frosty as the air outside, and the tension ratchets up when the wolves boldly enter human territory and stalk the team.
One might label this book Hound of the Baskervilles meets And Then There Were None meets a Michael Crichton novel, and the narrative itself references works ranging from Little Red Riding Hood to The Shining. But this is a Nevada Barr book through and through, With its careful examination of how humans interact with the natural world, and infectious fascination with nature and dense, resonant descriptions: ''Desperate earth-starved trees poked skeletal branches through the snow cover, black arthritic fingers reaching for a sky that was the same color as the grave they sank their roots in.'' Barr skillfully uses archetypal images of the wolf to deepen the suspense, but ultimately it's the more sinister human who is truly frightening.
• Delusion. Peter Abrahams. Morrow. 297 pages. $24.95.
Hurricane Bernadine (looking awfully like Katrina) has hit the city of Belle Isle in a bad way. Among the residents sifting through the physical and emotional debris is Alvin ''Pirate'' DuPree, who has lost two decades on a murder rap but finds his prospects on the upswing when FEMA unearths a photograph proving his innocence. Meanwhile, Nell Jarreau's fortunes take a downturn: Her boyfriend was the murder victim; her testimony locked Pirate away; and the real killer may still be loose. Even worse news: Nell later married the original investigating officer, and that double-edged photograph smacks of suppressed evidence.
By the book's midpoint, even inattentive readers will likely see the solution's outline. To Abrahams' credit, however, that hardly matters. The novel's power derives from delving deep into the characters' lives. Nell's waning confidence and growing suspicions lead her to question the frail faith she has put in herself and her loved ones. Pirate compares his story to another faith tale: Job's. Now that he's getting his life back plus a half-million-dollar settlement from the city. But these sudden boons hardly erase past troubles, and he remains haunted by the question ''Why did God pick on Job in the first place?'' Even as the mystery seems transparent, these characters' fates and the integrity of justice itself seem to swing in an unsteady balance, with Abrahams keeping the tension taut right through the end.
• Compulsion. Jonathan Kellerman. Ballantine. 337 pages. $27.
A young woman with car trouble is rescued by a Lauren Bacall-type in a Bentley, only to find their destination a little too final. A retired schoolteacher fetching her morning paper is stabbed by an elderly gent driving a late-model Mercedes. In the wake of these murders, some Internet searching reveals a ''cold case'' crime with another luxury car connection: two beauticians killed by a cowboy in a black Lincoln. All of which leaves psychologist Alex Delaware and LAPD detective Milo Sturgis tracking a serial killer with a clear modus operandi but no apparent motive.
This novel's structure is more classical: a dutiful search for connections conducted witness by witness, clue by clue. But the killer's identity seems evident early, and much of the plot simply hinges on locating him or her.
Kellerman keeps the action moving swiftly, writing in staccato paragraphs and brisk, bantering dialogue. Still, one of his draws is his background as a psychologist, and the maladies here often cry out for more analysis. The book is rife with bursts of commentary on family values and dysfunctions, society's materialism, even the vogue for reinventing oneself. But there's less effort toward illuminating the central villain's complex pathology than toward saving up for shock value in the finale.
• The Eye of the Leopard. Henning Mankell. Translated from Swedish by Steven T. Murray. New Press. 315 pages. $26.95.
Mankell's latest Kurt Wallander novel is less a detective novel than a coming-of-age tale. Yes, murder rears a brutally decapitated head late in the book, but no real inquiry follows. The main investigation involves a middle-aged Swede pondering his own past, and his guilt stems mostly from having been unfair to the people he left behind.
Ambitiously structured and themed, the novel begins with Hans Olofson lying in a malarial fever on his Zambian farm, desperately fearful of the workers outside, the ''200 black human beings who would gladly murder me, slit my throat, offer up my genitals in sacrifice, eat my heart.'' Subsequent chapters alternate between his first years in Africa and his boyhood and young adulthood in Sweden. He blames himself for a friend's childhood accident and a lover's tragic end, questions the impulse that took him to Africa to atone for these sins, and ponders time's fleeting nature, unfortunately with less philosophy than fluff: ``Does time have a face? How can one tell when it's waving and saying goodbye?''
''You're in Africa now. And the white man has never understood Africa,'' one native Zambian tells Olofson. But while this refrain crops up time and again, with too many characters serving only to provide broader historical context, Olofson makes slow progress toward bridging that central misunderstanding. The image that solves that mystery -- the point from which ''all ideas of the future for this continent must be derived'' -- seems tragically oversimplified, sentimental even.
Art Taylor reviewed these books for The Washington Post.
