Happy returns for two mystery writers

By Lawrence Block

Morrow. 304 pp. $24.95

By Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Translated from the Spanish

by Margaret Jull Costa

Putnam. 292 pp. $24.95

Reviewed by Bill Kent

I've become a fan of mid-series novels, and not just because we live in an era of sequels, prequels, remakes and retreads.

I'll admit that some are shameless attempts to exploit an audience's hunger for more of what they liked in the first outing. But great ones really show you what skilled authors can do.

With Lawrence Block, one of the most prolific mystery writers alive, it's always been plotting, and a clever ear for dialogue that illuminates the inner regions of his characters' souls.

Hit and Run

is the first novel in what began more than a decade ago as a series of short stories that Playboy magazine commissioned from Block.

Collected in 1998's

Hit Man

(followed by

Hit List

and

Hit Parade)

, they concern the adventures of professional assassin John Paul Keller, a quiet, bland-to-the-point-of-being-invisible sociopath who gets his assignments from a retired organized-crime figure in Yonkers, N.Y. (later replaced by the grandmotherly, thoroughly ruthless Dot).

When he gets an assignment, Keller leaves his one-room Manhattan apartment under an assumed name, with a stack of phony credit cards, flies coach to cities not known for their tourist interest or scenic grandeur, rents a midsize car, stays in roadside motels, eats fast food, and dispatches his victims with a methodical efficiency that lacks any of the flash, dazzle, romance, car chases and derring-do we have come to expect from tales about suave assassins and swaggering Mafia killers.

What makes the stories fascinating is Block's clever placement of sudden, horrific violence in the monotonously familiar strip malls, highway rest stops, and suburban developments of middle America.

There is also a vital plot twist - things never quite go as planned, and when it seems that Keller is going to get a dose of his own medicine, we begin to root for him, not as a stone-cold murderer, but as a basically decent guy who wants things to come out right.

In

Hit and Run,

Block re-uses a plot common to the thrillers - a man who has grown so comfortable working on the wrong side of the law that he yearns to retire is set up for a crime he didn't commit. Block used this plot in an earlier Keller story, and even Keller remarks on how familiar things are.

Until the suspense kicks in on Page 31.

Keller is in Des Moines, Iowa, buying an expensive set of stamps and otherwise hanging out as he waits for the go-ahead to whack his target. Then, someone murders the governor of Ohio - in Des Moines. Quickly appearing on every TV screen in the country is a photo of the suspect: Keller, who didn't do it.

It's a photo of Keller that Keller didn't even know existed.

In a lesser novel, this would set off breathless, breakneck chases and hair-raising escapes. For Keller, who has only a rented car, $200 in cash, and some worthless fake IDs and credit cards, it is a nail-biting challenge of hiding in plain sight, without anyone seeing him long enough to recognize him. To make matters worse, Dot has been murdered in Yonkers and her house set ablaze. The $2.5 million retirement fund of stocks and bonds she had been managing for him is now inaccessible. And his stamp collection has vanished.

Keller doesn't run, he drives, slowly, randomly, until he finds the one thing missing from his life: love. In New Orleans he kills a knife-wielding rapist, whose victim invites him back to her lonely house, where she is caring for her dying father. One thing gently leads to another. For the only time in his life, Keller feels loved. He is quietly remodeling houses damaged by Hurricane Katrina when his past catches up in a way that no one expects.

When Keller has to kill to escape discovery, Block conveniently makes Keller's victims more twisted than Keller could ever be. In the grim bedroom of a snarling racist, Keller discovers an inflatable doll with a mask: "The face was vaguely familiar, and after a moment Keller realized it was supposed to be Ann Coulter. Keller thought that was about the saddest thing he'd ever seen in his life."

Coulter fans won't like that, but devotees of the low-key suspense of John Le Carre's spy fiction will be enthralled as Keller decides to hunt down the people who framed him. It's the only way he and his new lover can live in peace.

Even with a new life, can Keller survive as the man he's always wanted to be?

Can anyone?

The same question is asked, and answered, in

The King's Gold,

the fourth book in Spanish mystery suspense novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte's series about the swashbuckling adventures of Captain Alatriste, a taciturn, highly skilled soldier of fortune in 17th-century Spain.

For some readers, Pérez-Reverte's Alatriste series is a departure from

The Flanders Panel,

The Club Dumas,

The Nautical Chart,

and other intellectual mysteries that have earned him a worldwide reputation. In those novels, Pérez-Reverte, a former journalist, researched art and chess (

The Flanders Panel

), the arcane complexities of navigation and mapmaking (

The Nautical Chart

) and book collecting (

The Club Dumas)

, and crafted intensely compelling, clue-oriented mysteries around them.

The Alatriste books reveal a fascination with swordplay and Renaissance concepts of honor that Pérez-Reverte first explored in

The Fencing Master,

an atmospheric, character-driven novel he wrote early in his career that did not gain worldwide release until his subsequent books became popular.

The King's Gold

is told from the point of view of Alatriste's 16-year-old apprentice, Íñigo Balboa, whom Alatriste rescued from the Inquisition in an earlier book.

The story starts slowly. Alatriste and Balboa are returning from the horrible carnage of war in Flanders to a magnificently corrupt, treacherously lawless Seville, "where the Ten Commandments weren't so much broken as hacked to pieces with a knife," Balboa tells us. The city is awaiting the latest arrival of the treasure fleet bearing gold and silver from the New World to enrich a bankrupt empire.

Agents of King Philip IV hire Alatriste to assemble a band of mercenaries for a raid on one of the ships of the treasure fleet. In addition to its declared freight, the vessel carries a secret cargo of gold ingots that could weigh heavily in a power struggle between the king and the formidable Duque de Medina Sidonia.

Balboa, meanwhile, falls hard for one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting, who uses him to trap and deliver Alatriste to the captain's old enemy, the craven, cynical Italian mercenary Gualterio Malatesta. Alatriste manages to escape, and Malatesta runs off to fight another day.

Balboa tells us early in the book that this adventure is not where Alatriste meets his fate, so it spoils nothing to say the mission is a gory success.

What's most shocking, as the book builds to a bloody climax, isn't the splattering realism of the fight scenes, but Alatriste's murder of two men who disobey his instructions and seek to carry off some of the gold for themselves. To take that gold would be dishonorable, and disloyal to the king - for whom Alatriste has no respect whatsoever.

Why serve a king you don't respect and who is clearly not worth the pain and bloodshed we have seen in

The King's Gold

? Because service adds purpose to a short, violent, rootless life.

It's hard to say exactly where Pérez-Reverte is taking this series, but with its great themes of honor, loyalty and personal morality in a thoroughly corrupt Renaissance Spain, it just might turn out to be the great work of his career.