Who bakes the bread in a war zone? Who's left to give the brides away? Who investigates civilian crimes like robbery and murder? These are the kinds of questions posed by J. Robert Janes, in a brilliant series of policiers set in Vichy France during the German occupation, and now taken up by Matt Beynon Rees, a former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine, in his provocative mysteries set in the Palestinian territories of today. Like Janes, Rees adopts a humanist perspective, keeping the military maneuvers in the background and focusing on ordinary people struggling to live ordinary lives. In a culture that thinks of terrorist bombers as martyrs, Rees's modest protagonist, an aging Palestinian schoolteacher named Omar Yussef, is no one's idea of a hero. But in two previous books, "The Collaborator of Bethlehem" and "A Grave in Gaza," this decent man proved his courage by daring to keep an open mind in a closed society. THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET (Soho, $24) finds Omar Yussef in Nablus, helping his friend Sami Jaffari, a lieutenant with the national police, investigate the theft of a priceless Torah scroll (said to be the oldest book in the world) from a Samaritan sect's synagogue. The mystery deepens when the son of the Samaritan priest is found murdered outside the sacred temple at the top of Mount Jerizim. Both Sami and Omar Yussef find themselves in turbulent political waters when they learn that the victim was the personal financial adviser to the late Palestinian president and was involved in the embezzlement of millions of dollars in Western aid. That sleight of hand has now brought to Nablus an official of the World Bank, who threatens to cut off all further financing if the money isn't found. Rees takes Omar Yussef into every nook and cranny of this ancient city, from the tunnels of the old souk to the mansions on Mount Jerizim built by the ruling elite, who have left their palaces in the casbah "in the penniless, desperate hands of the poor." Finding opinionated characters wherever he goes, the scholarly sleuth is careful, but not cowed. He tries persuasion on a young Hamas soldier, debates a fierce sheik with "a frown like a thousand fatal fatwas" on the question of moral tolerance, and confronts his own son for becoming an "adherent of a crazy, hard-line version of our religion." But he finds no joy in Nablus until he goes to Sami's wedding, where the sounds of music and laughter finally drown out all the sad and angry voices. "The shock of death is dead in us." That chilling line is spoken by a Hamas gunman in Matt Beynon Rees's novel. But it could just as easily have come from Levin, the protagonist of THE JERUSALEM FILE (Europa, paper, $15), Joel Stone's adamantly anti-heroic novel about a former Israeli security officer who has lost his will to live. Although the book is set up as a private-eye mystery, Levin doesn't really try to catch his client's adulterous wife in the act; spying on the lovers is enough for him to develop an obsession with the woman, who turns to him after her paramour is murdered, possibly "another victim of a random terrorist act." Stone packs this brief but moving character study with beautiful writing and much thought about the numbing experience of living with the constant expectation of sudden death from an enemy you can't quite bring yourself to hate. Even in a miserable man like Levin, "fellow-feeling for another human was hard to contain." Louise Penny applies her magic touch to A RULE AGAINST MURDER (Minotaur, $24.95), giving the village mystery an elegance and depth not often seen in this traditional genre. Although Penny is no slouch at constructing a whodunit puzzle, her great skill is her ability to create a charming mise-en-scène and inhabit it with complex characters. There's something otherworldly and altogether enchanting about the Manoir Bellechasse, the magnificent lodge in the Canadian wilderness where Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec, has taken his wife for their 35th wedding anniversary. Not only does the auberge offer grand views and the order and calm of old-world service, but it also observes a no-kill policy, with the proprietors feeding wild animals in winter and forbidding guests to hunt or fish. Someone obviously failed to explain that rule to the cultured but quarrelsome family holding a reunion to unveil a statue of their late patriarch, who makes his feelings felt by toppling down on one of his own. As Gamache observes, "things were not as they seemed," not even in a paradise like Bellechasse. And never in a Louise Penny mystery. Just as reading a mystery can give a person a good reason to wake up in the morning, solving a mystery can give a bona fide depressive like Lew Fonesca a reason not to kill himself. After his wife died in a hit-and-run accident, Fonesca, Stuart M. Kaminsky's immensely likable sleuth, got in his car and kept driving until he ran out of gas in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen in Sarasota. Five books later, in BRIGHT FUTURES (Forge/Tom Doherty, $23.95), the DQ is gone, but Lew is still solving mysteries - like the solid one here involving a murdered right-wing zealot and a popular high school student whose friends want him cleared of the crime. Although Lew uses detective work to pull himself out of his depression, it's a constant battle, and he needs the friends he's acquired in this meticulously maintained series. Kaminsky sees goodness in the oddest characters, which is why Lew is still alive, and why we're still reading. Matt Beynon Rees sets his provocative mysteries in the modern-day Palestinian territories.