Dirty work, a dirty trick and a practically clean getaway perplex the protagonists of three new

Dirty work, a dirty trick and a practically clean getaway perplex the protagonists of three new whodunits.
The books -- by Stuart Woods, Donald E. Westlake and Michael Connelly -- are among the latest hardcover novels of mystery and suspense, which also include works by Gwendoline Butler, Elizabeth Peters and Edward Marston.
Woods' ninth book in the series about Stone Barrington has the New York lawyer and former police officer doing "Dirty Work" (Putnam) after Barrington's law firm assigns him to help a client get snapshots of her philandering husband's escapades. It all seems moot when the husband dies in what appears to have been an accident. Then Barrington suspects that the victim had been killed beforehand.
In Westlake's "Money for Nothing" (Mysterious), Josh Redmont is the victim of a dirty trick -- which doesn't seem so bad at first. For seven years, he had been receiving a monthly check for $1,000 from "United States Agent." Attempts to identify the sender and return the money failed, so he kept it. Then his mysterious benefactor unexpectedly appears and tells Josh he must earn his windfall by helping terrorists in an assassination plot.
Harry Bosch, recent Los Angeles Police Department retiree, laces up his gumshoes again -- this time as a private eye -- in Connelly's "Lost Light" (Little, Brown). Shortly before he retired, Bosch was on a movie set inquiring about a production assistant's murder when $2 million in cash being used in a scene was stolen by masked intruders. The thieves made a clean getaway, even though Bosch's gunfire hit one of them. Bosch returns to the case since neither the money nor the murderer has been found.
While wife Stella is away making a movie, John Coffin, chief commander of the London Police, tackles his 13th case in Butler's "Coffin Knows the Answer" (St. Martin's). A package of photos showing severely abused children arrives at the Coffin home addressed to Stella. The photos don't seem to have anything to do with Coffin's ongoing investigation of the serial killings of young girls until similarities linking the two cases are uncovered.
Uncovering things is what archaeologist-sleuth Amanda Peabody and her Egyptologist husband do plenty of. In Peters' 15th book in the series, "Children of the Storm" (Morrow), it's 1919, the Great War is over, and Amanda and family are celebrating a friend's important find -- a burial site complete with mummies, coffins, jewels and beaded robes. The celebration is short-lived, however, when some of the artifacts disappear and a suspect is murdered.
Fans of Marston's "Domesday" series will have a hoot with "The Owls of Gloucester" (St. Martin's), 10th in the series set in medieval England. Two novices find the body of a monk whose throat has been slit from ear to ear. The investigation is taken up by Domesday Commissioners and series regulars Delchard and Bret, who happen to be in the area to settle a land dispute.
OTHER NEW MYSTERIES
There's mayhem aloft, afloat and underwater: Sabotage is suspected when an experimental computer program for troubled aircraft in flight goes awry in John J. Nance's "Skyhook" (Putnam); a passenger is found murdered in her cabin aboard a seniors' cruise on the Great Lakes in "Ransom at Sea" (St. Martin's) by Fred Hunter; and a drought uncovers a long-submerged riverboat in the Mississippi, attracting treasure-hunters and a murderer in Rett MacPherson's "Blood Relations" (St. Martin's).
Land developing develops into a dangerous business in "The Body in the Lighthouse" (Morrow), Katherine Hall Page's 13th mystery for Faith Fairchild, who finds the murdered corpse of an unpopular real estate developer in an abandoned lighthouse in Maine; and in "Tracking Bear" (Forge) by Aimee and David Thurlo, in which Ella Clah of the Navajo Police has her hands full when threats and murder result from a developer's plans to build a nuclear power plant on the New Mexico reservation.
Asia is the crime scene in "The Thai Amulet" (Berkley), Lyn Hamilton's seventh book about Lara McClintoch, antiques dealer from Toronto, who is in Bangkok looking for a missing colleague; and "The Dragon King's Palace" (St. Martin's), Laura Joh Rowland's eighth tale set in 17th-century Japan and featuring Sano, the shogun's investigator, whose latest case involves the kidnapping and imprisonment of the shogun's mother and of Sano's wife.
In "The Rules of Silence" (Warner) by David Lindsey, the head of a software company is kidnapped and instructed to make some bad business moves that will cost him $64 million.
And it's 1954 as two U.S. marshals suspect some unsavory goings-on at a hospital for the criminally insane as they search for an escaped patient in "Shutter Island" (Morrow) by Dennis Lehane.