Reviews: A roundup of mysteries, including Brian Freeman and Donna Leon

"Goodbye to the Dead" by Brian Freeman. (Quercus, 416 pages, $26.99.)

In a downpour outside a Duluth dive bar, detective Serena Dial witnesses a murder. Dial chases the killer through rain-slicked streets into Irving Park, where he escapes. The crime forces Dial and detective Jonathan Stride (her lover) to take another look at an infamous crime of passion that had a connection to Stride's beloved dead wife.

Over the years, Stride has "walked up ordinary driveways to ordinary houses too many times" to take any investigation lightly, but because this case has landed on his own doorstep it raises the stakes, professionally and personally.

Stride's mean streets may be Superior and Lake, but his heightened moral code puts him in the company of Bosch, Thorne, Tennison and Skinner, some of my other favorite fictional detectives time has not mellowed.

Events: 7 p.m. March 9, Barnes & Noble, Har Mar Mall, Roseville; 7 p.m. March 22, Barnes & Noble, Galleria, Edina.

"The Waters of Eternal Youth," by Donna Leon. (Atlantic Monthly Press, 292 pages, $26.)

Leon's latest novel marks the 25th anniversary of her wonderfully atmospheric series set in Venice, Italy, featuring the even-tempered and well-respected Commissario Guido Brunetti.

A sweet poignancy flows through Leon's narrative like the faint smell of chrysanthemums bordering the ancient palazzos even as Brunetti tries to hold back the "danger of advancing tides."

"The Passenger," by Lisa Lutz. (Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $25.99.)

The narrator in Lutz's book claims she didn't kill her husband. She insists that even though she doesn't have an alibi, she didn't "have anything to do with Frank's death," but for complicated reasons she can't have anyone looking at her life too closely. Not even her chiropractor, Dr. Mike, who gave her "adjustments" on a regular basis.

So she leaves Frank's body at the bottom of the stairs and flees her home in Waterloo, Wis. She creates another identity — someone with "good posture" who doesn't wear shoes that "take a bite" out of her feet, and, more important, someone single who can "keep her head straight." But the world, fate, life, whatever you want to call it has other plans for our narrator, and Amelia or Tanya or whatever you want to call her realizes she can't keep running away from a fight.

Lutz's comedic novels about the Spellman clan are terrific, but this stand-alone is darker and trickier and, for me, funnier — Elmore Leonard funny.

The widow in the title of this gripping psychological debut thriller is Jean Taylor, whose husband was accused of a heinous crime. Two weeks after his trial he's hit by a bus in the parking lot of a Sainsbury's grocery store. Set in Southampton, England, Barton's novel explores the crime and its punishment from intersecting points of view, including Jean's, a reporter's and that of the police detective in charge of the original investigation.

I'm not sure any narrator is ever really reliable, but Barton's narrators (all of whom may or may not be lying to us) show us the investigation as it unfolded in the past while also revealing its consequences on the same players in the present. From the beginning, the widow calls her husband's peccadilloes "his nonsense," so you've been warned.

"Perfect Days," by Raphael Montes. (Penguin Press, 272 pages, $25.)

Teo and Clarice are a "perfect fit" — that is, Teo, a psychopath, has kidnapped Clarice with the promise that their togetherness will help inspire her writing. Clarice wants to be a screenwriter. Teo wants more than anything to make Clarice his perfect woman.

Until he began stalking Clarice, Teo's most intimate relationships with women were with the hospital cadaver (he's a med student) and his paraplegic mother. For Teo "there was something magical about what they were doing … following an itinerary laid out in a screenplay" like some kind of romantic road movie, but for Clarice it quickly becomes a horror film.