MYSTERIES IN DRAG

By John Skow

BY VENERABLE TRADITION AND not-so-arcane formula, the first three thrillers from the top of the new year's pop-trash pile constitute a trend. Last year's trend was hard-boiled women detectives, by such hard-boiled women writers as Carol O'Connell (Mallory's Oracle) and Patricia Cornwell (The Body Farm). The new trend is, let's see (flip, flip), hard-boiled women, right, but (flip, flip) written by soft-to-medium-boiled men.

This may not be progress (What do guys know about lipstick stains on teeth?). At any rate, the results are, as critics say while fishing for a coin to toss, mixed. The Final Judgment, by Richard North Patterson (Knopf; 437 pages; $25), is less than it should be, given the author's success with his earlier books Eyes of a Child and Degree of Guilt. These are tough, well-plotted legal thrillers, set in California, with a good mix of believable male and female characters. The new story takes one of the supporting actors from the earlier books, a judge named Caroline Masters, and puts her at the center of what is more a soap opera than a mystery. The absurdly intricate plot has Caroline, who is up for a federal judgeship, called back to her ancestral manse in New Hampshire, a place she left in deep and unexplained bitterness when she was 22, to defend a niece who seems to have stabbed her boyfriend to death.

What follows is not supposed to be funny, but sure enough, the boyfriend whom Caroline jilted with a Dear John note when she fled town a quarter-century ago is still single, not too thick around the waist, and still carries the torch. He's also, natch, the prosecuting attorney who intends to jug Caroline's niece--who, it develops, is not really her niece, but ... Tension mounts. So do the old lovers. But the tale's prevailing oddity is that Caroline is not convincingly female. Not that she should cry or lose earrings, but as things are, she is simply a stick-figure lawyer who happens to have a woman's name. Had Patterson hit the replace key on his word processor and swapped "George" for "Caroline" just before finishing his final draft, it would be fairly hard to tell there had been a change (excepting the fact that the book would then become a gay romance).

Intensity, by Dean Koontz (Knopf; 308 pages; $25), is expert schlock by a writer who has specialized in horror. No creatures from beyond the grave here, just that reliable old formula, babe in distress. Chyna Shepherd is the sole survivor after a fairly efficient thrill killer invades a house where she is a weekend guest and murders everyone else. She's terrified and unarmed, but naturally, instead of calling the cops, she stows away in the killer's motor home as he escapes.

Chyna is discovered, of course, and the rest of the book pretty much amounts to 200 pages of sadomasochistic gloating by the killer, who tells Chyna at windy length what he is going to do to her, heh-heh, and to a second beautiful young woman he has imprisoned in the cellar of his mountain hideaway. Or what his four Dobermans will do to any would-be rescuer: "They are trained first to tear out the throat. Then they will bite the face to effect maximum terror and pain--go for the eyes, the nose, the lips. Then the crotch. Then the belly ..." What is truly frightening is to imagine some prospective reader leafing through Intensity at an airport newsstand, happening on the Doberman passage, thinking, "Wow, great stuff," and buying the book.

But if bad trash is queasy-making, good trash makes the heart leap, and House of Smoke, by J.F. Freedman (Viking; 438 pages; $23.95), is a good, interesting, reasonably believable crime story. Kate Blanchard is a smart, sexy, gutsy (though not especially tough) private eye whose fouled-up life does not smooth out any as her story progresses. She would like to regain custody of her two teenage daughters, now living with her sister after a train-wreck divorce, but her profession keeps getting in the way. She is thoroughly beaten up (and thus unpresentable as a responsible mother) in pursuit of a complicated case involving a failed dope-smuggling operation, an oil company's evil designs on the Santa Barbara channel, and the sneaky behavior of an arrogant rich family. And she often asserts herself sexually in situations when doing so is not, as psychobabblers say, appropriate behavior.

But within the conventions of detective fiction, she is reasonably three-dimensional. For instance, she hates the gun she sometimes carries--just doesn't like the thing, yuck, although she can use it if she has to. Unfortunately, novelist Freedman doesn't quite manage the trick of making the characters with whom Kate collides as particular and formidable as his private eye. But his mystery stays puzzling till near the book's end. And the loving jangle between Kate and her daughters is a tributary theme that might carry over to a sequel.