MYSTERIES

Burn Marks by Sara Paretsky (Delacorte, $17.95) Who is America's most convincing and engaging professional female private-eye? A couple of seasons back, I might have cast my vote for Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, a scrappy yet agreeably low-key operative in southern California. But V. I. Warshawski, the star of Sara Paretsky's series about white-collar crime and wall-to-wall corruption in Chicago, now clearly leads the growing field. Initially a somewhat tinny composite of feminist and antiestablishment virtues, V. I.-call her Vic (for Victoria), but never Vicky-has grown more flesh-and-bloodily complex with each of her no-nonsense investigations into insurance scams and municipal cover-ups. And now, in her sixth outing, Burn Marks, V. I. proves to be irascibly irresistible as family ties (of the most malodorous sort) pull her deeper and deeper into an ugly arson-and-murder case. The mayhem begins when alcoholic Auntie Elena, a 60-ish ex-hooker, shows up at V. I.'s apartment at 3 a.m., having been burned out of the SRO hotel where she was ''still turning the occasional trick on the day the pension checks arrived.'' Arson, of course-but why? Also: How does the SRO fire connect to the death of a pregnant junkie or to shady construction deals for minority contractors? Well, the basic nature of the conspiracy at work here will come as no surprise. But one or two of the conspirators are worth unmasking. And narrator V. I., whether saving Auntie Elena (and self) from a second fire, refusing to be patronized by macho cops, or fending off the neighbors (one chummy oldster, one hostile yuppie), is flinty and rueful and very good company. A-

Devices and Desires by P. D. James (Knopf, $19.95) ''She's not just a mystery writer. She's a novelist.'' That's what certain reviewers-the kind who look down on mysteries or feel embarrassed about liking them-love to say about P. D. James. Unfortunately, around 15 years ago, James apparently started listening to her most high-toned admirers. Just about the time that P. D. James attained critics'-darling status, her books began to lose the edge and urgency that kept all those literary textures-the psychological rumination, the seven-layer atmosphere-from bogging things down. The writing remained a page-by-page pleasure. And, thanks in part to television versions of vintage (1960s) cases for James' moody hero Adam Dalgliesh, bestsellerdom was a sure thing through the 1980s. But the slightly ponderous Death of an Expert Witness (1977) was followed by the belabored preciousness of The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982) and the talky sprawl of A Taste for Death (1987). As you might expect from the portentous title, Devices and Desires (weighing in at 433 pages) continues this inflationary decline. Commander Dalgliesh, soulful as ever, seeks a quiet retreat from Scotland Yard in remote Norfolk-only to discover the body of Hilary Robarts, administrator at the local nuclear-power station. Is Robarts the latest victim of a serial killer who's been working the neighborhood? So it seems at first. But it's soon obvious that Robarts was strangled instead by one of her many enemies: There's a foolishly contrived lineup of suspects that's hardly worthy of James' earnest, brooding close-ups. Meanwhile, little is made of the promising power- station setting, which lacks the memorable workplace dynamics of the hospitals in early James novels-or even the laboratory in Expert Witness. Most disappointing of all, Dalgliesh himself remains almost entirely on the sidelines while the bulk of the investigation is carried out by a sour yet uninteresting Norfolk policeman. Can so many well-turned paragraphs and craftsmanlike chapters really add up to a bad book? They can and they do, when the motor's missing. C+

A Chill Rain in January by L. R. Wright (Viking, $17.95) No one gets inside a psychopath's head like Ruth Rendell. But keep your eyes on L. R. Wright -who won an Edgar for The Suspect in 1986 and who continues to turn up a persuasive mix of evil, pathos, and offbeat charm in the villages along British Columbia's ''Sunshine Coast. The psychopath this time is beautiful recluse Zoe Strachan, a bad-seed grown into poisonous full flower. She handily murders her estranged brother-a push down the cellar stairs-when he comes into possession of her ghastly childhood diaries and tries a spot of blackmail. But now Zoe must locate and destroy those incriminating diaries. Standing in her way, in his pokey fashion, is Sergeant Karl Alberg, the sedentary Mountie featured in Wright's previous novels. And an even unlikelier obstacle to Zoe's safety is Ramona Orlitzki, a 70-ish widow with Alzheimer's disease, a fugitive from the local hospital, who decides to hide out in a vacant cabin on the Strachan property (Zoe uses it for her periodic forays into quick, anonymous, kinky sex). Wright takes a lot of risks here. The psycho-portrait of Zoe, heavy on italicized flashbacks, almost skids into pulp melodrama. Ramona's wanderings teeter on the edge of maudlin. And Karl's ongoing romance with librarian Cassandra Mitchell occasionally threatens to become folksy soap opera. But somehow, with dark humor and quirky dialogue and canny pacing, it all comes together gently, grimly-and lingers in the mind. B+