Books: Going Beyond Brand Names

(2 of 2)

Simon Brett specializes in what mystery fans call "the cozy," a story in which most of the mayhem is discreetly offstage, and the detective is more likely to be a canny old woman than a boozy middle-aged man. Of the many imitations of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, none has been quite so slippery and criminous as Melita Pargeter, a white-haired, well-heeled widow of a burglar whom Brett beguilingly introduced in 1987's A Nice Class of Corpse. Having skewered the pretenses of her fellow residents of a retirement hotel in that volume, she returns in Mrs, Presumed Dead (Scribner's; 248 pages; $16.95) to expose the follies of an executive suburb where the previous owner of her home has disappeared. Aiding in her attempts to locate the missing woman are a wry assortment of her late husband's crooked cronies, all of them, like Mrs. Pargeter, now at least semilegit.

The newcomer of the year thus far is John Collee, a British physician and writer of TV medical scripts. In A Paper Mask (Arbor House; 232 pages; $16.95), his second book, the premise is that most emergency-room orderlies fancy themselves able, by practical experience, to diagnose and treat patients, and that one of them decides to give it a try. This antihero, who assumes the name and hospital residency of an acquaintance who is killed in an accident before he can report for duty, makes some disastrous mistakes -- but such is the imposing aura of his purported professional credentials that he keeps his post through scrape after scrape, and sometimes does succeed. Nonetheless, he lives in fear of exposure, and tension mounts. The character is depicted with a remarkably skillful blend of empathy and distaste, so that from page to page the reader roots for him to get caught or to get away with - it all. With complete believability, the plot keeps twisting right up to the final words. Like so many fellow toilers in mystery-genre obscurity, Collee proves himself a true novelist. A Paper Mask should satisfy readers who have never cared whether the FBI was bursting into the kitchen or, as Christie suggested in a title, the body was in the library.