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In Safekeeping, a witty, Wodehousian gavotte from the confines of an English boys' school to the streets of Harlem, with several beguiling stops between, Mcdonald records the travails of a small boy, heir to a dukedom, who is orphaned during the London blitz and sent off to the uncertain care of a sodden New York City tabloid reporter. Within weeks the boy becomes the target of a Mafia hit man, thereby allowing the author to mix sociology and satire, goofy narrative and authentic terror.
An Unkindness of Ravens (Pantheon; 245 pages; $15.95) by Ruth Rendell marries the two disparate strains in her writing: the slow psychological disintegration of ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and conventional detection by kindly Chief Inspector Reg Wexford and his younger deputy Mike Burden. The plot involves bigamy and incest and probes the links between feminism and lesbianism. As is almost always true in a Rendell narrative, things are considerably simpler than they at first seem. Her portrait of the killer is a classic Christie-style evocation of narcissistic ego.
Steps Going Down (Countryman Press; 307 pages; $14.95) omits Author Joseph Hansen's recurring sleuth, Insurance Investigator Dave Brandstetter, but unfolds in his usual seedy gay Southern California milieu. The central character, Darryl Cutler, is a rogue undone by his few fleeting moments of trust and devotion. A former male prostitute, he becomes infatuated with a blond boy as pretty and venal as he used to be. Cutler knows that he is being used. Even so, his sexual itch drives him to theft, fraud and murder. Each crime makes him more subject to blackmail. The tale moves toward its climax with a mounting sense of catastrophe, but who will destroy whom, and how, remains uncertain until the final pages. Hansen writes as ably as anyone in the genre about the consequences of lust and yearning. For the nonprurient, the descriptive passages of lovemaking are kept brief.
An Advancement of Learning (Countryman Press; 254 pages; $14.95) was written by Briton Reginald Hill in 1971 as the second book featuring his police duo Dalziel and Pascoe, but this is its first appearance in the U.S. Hill has written better books since, including this year's Exit Lines and the chilling 1984 portrait of a psychopath, Deadheads. Nonetheless, this volume is a skillful reworking of a standard routine in mystery fiction: the discovery of a long-buried skeleton and the consequent unraveling of a skein of past concealment and deceit. The setting is a mediocre British college, recently converted from all girls to coeducation, and the fierce possessiveness of the female Old Guard gives the story depth and humor.
Tickled to Death (Scribners; 231 pages; $13.95) is a collection of short stories, only one of them featuring Author Simon Brett's delightful amateur detective, the hammy and frequently out-of-work actor Charles Paris. Brett's ten Paris novels thrive on their bitchy wit and backstage authenticity. Outside those environs his writing can become fey and whimsical. But Brett is a specialist at sketching protagonists who are at once charming and palpably rotten, so that their ultimate escape or exposure remains a matter of genuine suspense.