Jack Reacher number 20 (after last year's Personal) begins with the disposal of the body of someone named Keever, with a backhoe in a hog pen near a town in the Midwest called Mother's Rest, which Reacher decides to visit (as he points out, he has "no place to go, and all the time in the world to get there"). Almost immediately, he bumps into a beautiful, smart-talking damsel in distress, Michelle Chang, who's looking for her PI colleague: Keever. It should come as no surprise to Child's vast readership that Reacher and Chang will join forces to solve the mystery of Mother's Rest, and that it will involve danger, violence, some romance, snappy dialogue, sharp plotting, and lots of travel (Chicago, L.A., Phoenix, and San Francisco). Unlike the other books in the series, the monstrousness of the villainy erases the line separating crime and horror fiction. One happily familiar feature is reader Hill, who's been giving voice to Reacher since book one. Not only does he convey toughness without sounding like a 1940s B movie sleuth, his villains easily shift from good old boy bonhomie to sneering arrogance, innocents speak softly (sometimes even tremulously), and his version of Reacher's mixture of cynicism and insouciance fits the character to a T. A Delacorte hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

COVER YOUR EYES - this one's really nasty. Not even cookie-baking moms and their innocent children are spared in THE KILLING LESSONS (St. Martin's, $25.99), Saul Black's thriller about an interstate manhunt for a killer whose modus operandi is so bizarre even his own accomplice can't figure it out. Xander King and his browbeaten sidekick, Paulie Stokes, have been doing their filthy business for the past three years, abducting women in one state and usually leaving their mutilated remains in another. The death count is up to seven and climbing, according to Valerie Hart, the San Francisco cop who's lead detective on the case. But by the time the killers make their way to the isolated farmhouse in Colorado where Rowena Cooper and her two children live, Xander is starting to unravel. He's unable to complete his peculiar ritual of leaving a foreign object in each victim, and although he doesn't realize it, Rowena's 10-year-old daughter has escaped. Despite the almost shockingly good writing, it's too easy to pick the book apart. For one thing, it feels researched, which wasn't the case when this British author, writing under his real name, Glen Duncan, produced a stylish horror novel called "The Last Werewolf." It's fun to spot a sly acknowledgment of one obvious reference work, "The Silence of the Lambs," embedded in the story. But the alcoholic, obsessive, self-destructive detective is no less a cliché because she's a woman, and the graphic brutality directed at women who bear no resemblance to the maternal figure who made a monster of Xander evokes torture scenes straight out of "Criminal Minds." And while Valerie's detective skills are impressive (watch for the witty thought process that takes her from Christmas shopping to Russell Crowe to the true identity of Xander King), you still have to wonder why the F.B.I. isn't all over a case of interstate kidnapping. But even when the plot goes into melodramatic overdrive, it's impossible not to be swept away by its propulsive momentum. The appeal of this dark and intensely disquieting book isn't entirely visceral either. By shifting the narrative point of view, Black allows us to peer into the depths of his many richly developed characters, from the surprisingly complex killers and their dedicated hunters to the supporting players who pop up only to be ruthlessly disposed of. AFTER KNOCKING AROUND Europe in his last book, Lee Child's wide-bodied hero, Jack Reacher, is back where he belongs in MAKE ME (Delacorte, $28.99), bumming around the country and checking out the infinite weirdness of the American heartland. There's a lot of weird going on in Mother's Rest, the intriguingly named agricultural town that greets Reacher when he obeys a directive from what he calls his "lizard brain" and hops off a train in the middle of nowhere. Everyone from the motel clerk to the counterman at the diner immediately takes Reacher for someone else - possibly a colleague of Michelle Chang, a former F.B.I. operative who's in town looking for a missing colleague - and a neighborhood watch is set up to keep an eye on both of them. This would be comical, if it weren't so sinister; but Child has always been sensitive to the air of menace clinging to lonesome towns on railway lines that only run from here to there, dropping off travelers who promptly disappear. Once the obligatory out-of-town action scenes are out of the way and Reacher comes up for air from his steamy affair with Chang, the story returns to Mother's Rest to expose the unspeakably creepy things that go on in the small towns you see when you look out the window of the speeding train that's taking you away from all that. DONALD SMITH'S exceptional first novel, THE CONSTABLE'S TALE (Pegasus, $25.95), is a revelatory look at colonial America, as seen through the eyes of a volunteer constable in North Carolina. Harry Woodyard is a man of strong principles, some acquired by observing the "Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour." Rule No. 110 - "Labour to keep alive in your Breast that Little Spark of Celestial fire Called Conscience" - serves Harry well when the Campbell family is murdered. An old Indian named Comet Elijah, found camping in the woods, is jailed for the massacre, and given the prejudices of the Indian-hating sheriff, Harry is the old man's only hope. In unmasking a villain, the investigation also provides insights into the surprisingly worldly ways of our colonial ancestors. THE BEST AMATEUR sleuths are often social misfits like Patrick Fort, the appealing hero of Belinda Bauer's deliciously macabre mystery, RUBBERNECKER (Atlantic Monthly, $24). Though Patrick has Asperger's syndrome, the results of his biology and zoology exams are off the chart, winning him a place at Cardiff University. Despite having zero social skills, Patrick is a whiz in the anatomy lab, so far ahead of his class that he alone realizes the cadaver on his dissection table didn't die of natural causes. In a parallel narrative sizzling with tension, Sam Galen, a fully conscious but paralyzed patient in a coma ward, silently rages at his inability to tell anyone that he's seen another patient being murdered. In a tour de force of plotting and writing, Bauer not only establishes a bond between Patrick and Sam but renders their separate voices with beauty and compassion.