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CECILIAN VESPERS

By Anne Emery, ECW, 288 pages, $24.95

Anne Emery has already won one Arthur Ellis Award for her first Monty Collins mystery, and this one should get her on the short list for another. Cecilian Vespers is slick, smart and populated with lively characters. It's also a nicely crafted mystery.

The setting is Halifax in 1991. Criminal lawyer and blues aficionado Montague Collins's old friend Father Brennan Burke is realizing his long-held dream of an academy of church music to reintroduce the great works of the Catholic Church's past to a new generation of clergy and laypeople.

The school's first class comes from all over the world, and Father Burke is thrilled. Like many Catholics, he's not a fan of the “new” musical efforts that arose following Vatican II. He wants to reintroduce Mozart and motets, but some of the students aren't happy with his “elitist” ideas. They want to invent completely new liturgical music.

Clashes over music may seem slight as a setting for murder, but as one who lived through the years when Latin was replaced by colloquial languages and the Tantum Ergo morphed into “Eat my body, drink my blood/ And we'll all sing a song of love,” I can attest to the ferocity of many Catholics' feeling over the new rites. Not everyone adored the Singing Nun and her guitar.

With this as background, a renowned theologian is murdered in a Halifax church, just before Vespers on Saint Cecilia's day. And not just killed, but almost decapitated, and spread on the altar of an old church that is about to be demolished. There were plenty of people who disagreed with the dead man's theological positions, including high-ranking Vatican bureaucrats, but no one can believe someone would commit murder over theology. Or would they?

Monty and Father Burke face a range of suspects that includes an ex-cop from the former East Berlin police, a Vatican enforcer, a renegade priest and an angry woman who hates the changes wrought by Vatican II.

Emery's book requires her to elucidate some fairly arcane bits of church history, along with complex theological ideas. She manages this with some talky dialogue, but it doesn't drag down the essential plot, finding the motive for a heinous crime.

RED APRIL

By Santiago Roncagliolo, translated by Edith Grossman, Pantheon, 271 pages, $28.95

It's hard to imagine a more riveting thriller than this English-language debut by a young Peruvian. From the opening chapter, a dry bureaucratic account of a terrifying incident, we know we are in for something very different from the run-of-the-mill mystery.

The bureaucrat is Felix Chacaltana Saldivar, associate prosecutor for the district of Huamanga and the town of Ayacucho. Saldivar is the most stolid of men, one who loves his reports and takes care with all the minute details of who said what, including selecting words that have no letter “ñ” in them, since his aging typewriter can't make that character any longer. Possibly, one day, Lima will see fit to send him a new IBM; until then, he makes do.

There is nothing in Saldivar's life to prepare him to supervise a murder investigation, particularly one with dangerous political dimensions. As the case unfolds, with bizarre clues that seem to lead only to more strange mysteries, Saldivar knows only that he has to keep moving, keep chasing the leads until he comes to the end. He will either find the solution to the mystery, or it will kill him.

Roncagliolo is working with the classic noir form here, as many other Latin American crime novelists have, but his take is original. Maybe it's the backdrop of the Senderista insurgent movement, or maybe it's the mysterious spirit of Nazca desert, but Red April ends up (after many, many original twists) in a class all its own.

THE CROSSING PLACES

By Elly Griffiths, McClelland & Stewart, 304 pages, $29.99

There are crime novels with such gripping central characters that the plot becomes secondary. The Crossing Places is one of these. Ruth Galloway, university lecturer and forensic archeologist, is one of those characters. This novel appears to be the first of a projected series, and it's an extremely promising beginning.

The setting is the chilly coast of Norfolk. Dr. Galloway is called to the body of a child found in the salt marsh. The detective in charge is DCI Harry Nelson. Ten years before, he was in charge of the case of a child who disappeared. Her name was Lucy and he has never forgotten her. He thinks this child may be Lucy and that Ruth Galloway is the expert who'll prove it.

But the dead girl isn't Lucy; this one died more than 2,000 years ago. Griffiths blends her Iron Age mystery into the modern one with skill, but it's Ruth Galloway who keeps this all going. She's solitary and plump and smart and self-assured, and very, very likeable.

DROOD

By Dan Simmons, Little, Brown, 784 pages, $29.95

This is the second crime novel on Dickens and Edwin Drood this year. Simmons's novel isn't as good as The Last Dickens , by Matthew Pearl. For one thing, it's far, far, far too long. Simmons seems to never have met a piece of research he didn't love enough to include in his narrative; as a result, the story meanders and maunders.

Drood is, of course, about Dickens's unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood . Simmons's book covers the last five years of the writer's life, 1865 to 1870, the period after he was in the terrible Staplehurst train crash, in which 10 people died and dozens were hurt.

Simmons takes that event and turns it into a ghost/vampire/ghoul/horror tale told by Dickens's friend and fellow writer Wilkie Collins. The real Wilkie Collins, however, would have edited his manuscript far more closely. Do we really need two full pages of descriptions of the disgusting smell of Victorian London? Do we care for minute descriptions of the teeth of prostitutes or the dead of the Staplehurst crash?

The padding detracts from the story, and as the mystery of Dickens and Drood (who appears mysteriously at Staplehurst and leads Dickens on a trail of horror) deepens, we skim whole sections in search of the thread. There's a good book buried in here somewhere.

THE WEIGHT OF STONES

By C.B. Forrest, RendezVous, 256 pages, $15.95

This promising debut by Ottawa journalist C.B. Forrest is planned as the beginning of a series. The setting is Toronto and the central character is Detective Charlie McKelvey, a man lost in grief and guilt. It seems that in a burst of “tough love,” McKelvey turned his son out of the house and the boy was murdered.

McKelvey is certain he knows who killed his son, but there's no evidence and the investigation seems permanently stalled, until McKelvey is forced to retire. Then the scene is set for him to have either justice or revenge. Forrest goes a bit too far on the emotional side of character, and is a bit weak on the plot, but there's some good writing and McKelvey deserves a sequel.

THE PREACHER

By Camilla Läckberg, translated by Steven T. Murray, HarperCollins, 419 pages, $22.95

The Preacher is the second Camilla Läckberg novel to be translated from Swedish, and it shows why Läckberg is often compared to Ruth Rendell.

A child finds a woman's dead body wedged into a cliff, on top of the bones of two other women. All three have been murdered, but two of the murders are more than 20 years old.

The setting is Fjällbacka, a pretty coastal town in Sweden's far north. It's a seaside holiday haven in summer, but policeman Patrik Hedstrom must deal with a team that is hot, sweaty and shorthanded because of vacations. In fact, Patrik himself is on holiday when the bodies appear, and he and his partner, Erika, are about to become parents.

The central mystery – who killed the three women and why the 20-year gap – is more than enough plot, but Läckberg's intriguing subplots and marvellous characters add depth and dimension.