The thing about Sara Paretsky is, she's tough - not because she observes the bone-breaker conventions of the private-eye genre but because she doesn't flinch from examining old social injustices others might find too shameful (and too painful) to dig up. In the dozen novels she's written about V.I. Warshawski, her stouthearted but short-tempered Chicago P.I., Paretsky has questioned the memories of Holocaust victims, reopened wounds from the McCarthy era and repeatedly wailed on the local political machine for its flagrant corruption. Paretsky is in full Furies mode in HARDBALL (Putnam, $26.95), which reaches back to the tumultuous summer of 1966, when Martin Luther King led civil rights marches through the Southwest Side and was met by race riots that cut through families and across generations, even spilling over into the churches. Warshawski, who was only 10 at the time, assumes the burden of other people's memories when she agrees to help an old woman who hasn't seen her son since he disappeared during the January blizzard of 1967. The son, Lamont Gadsden, was in a black street gang whose members saw the light and became Dr. King's personal bodyguards, and he was at his side in Marquette Park when rioters killed one of King's followers. So the very white and very female private eye looking into the youth's disappearance finds herself ignored, insulted or attacked by every bent cop, crooked pol and angry political activist who'd like to keep his own shabby sins buried in the past. Unlike many popular crime writers, Paretsky doesn't turn out books like some battery hen (the previous novel in this series was published in 2005), so it's a distinct pleasure to hear her unapologetically strident voice once again. While her themes here are familiar - Chicago's legacy of police brutality and political corruption is a never-ending source of material - she gives them a personal spin by drawing on her own experiences as a community organizer during the summer of 1966 and sharing them with a large cast of voluble and opinionated characters, whose memories are as raw as her own. There's a real sting to both the anger of a black man who took care of a friend beaten to insensibility by racist cops and the grief of an old white woman displaced from her family home. Voices like these can ring in your ears for - oh, 40 years and more. Writers can be so cruel. Without any warning, they cavalierly kill off their series sleuths (Colin Dexter), consign them to early retirement (Rennie Airth), send them off on extended foreign assignments (Barbara Cleverly) or, in the case of Peter Lovesey, simply dump them. Beginning in 1970 with "Wobble to Death," Lovesey wrote eight rough-and-tumble Victorian mysteries featuring Sergeant Cribb, a bare-knuckled police officer who went in for the extreme (not to say barbaric) sports of his day and was as familiar with London's seedy haunts as any criminal. Eight years later, the series was kaput, leaving fans with fond memories that can yet be fanned, now that Soho Press is bringing out handsome paperback editions of the novels, with great cover art by the likes of Thomas Nast and Gustave Doré. Meanwhile, the most durable of Lovesey's other detectives, Inspector Peter Diamond of the Bath C.I.D., has his 10th outing in SKELETON HILL (Soho, $24). The story opens with a modern-day re-enactment of a battle fought in Bath in 1643 and works itself up into one of Lovesey's familiar convoluted plots, layered with historical lore and teeming with comic characters up to their necks in no good. Diamond is a classic - better catch him while you can. With its sad story about lost boys and its mournful theme of the indifference of the living to those who walk out of their lives, ARCTIC CHILL (Minotaur, $24.99) may well be the most thoroughly depressing of all the gloomy police procedurals coming out of those cold lands near the Arctic Circle. But since the storyteller is Arnaldur Indridason, this Icelandic tale is delivered with exquisite sensitivity, in a moody translation by Bernard Scudder and Victoria Cribb. The murder of a 10-year-old schoolboy and the disappearance of his teenage brother alert Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson to the racial prejudice in Reykjavik against its growing population of Asian immigrants. "You run into closed doors everywhere," he observes during the investigation, which leads him to grave thoughts about his island nation and the insularity that once protected it - but now threatens to isolate it - from the world beyond its shores. There's always a log fire burning and it's always story time in the charming mysteries Louise Penny sets in sleepy Three Pines, a quaint Québécois clone of Brigadoon. While constant readers may think they know all there is to know about its eccentric villagers, Penny is a great one for springing surprises. In THE BRUTAL TELLING (Minotaur, $24.99), the dear chap who owns Olivier's Bistro is revealed to have a cutthroat business streak that may have something to do with the old hermit who's found dead one morning on the bistro floor. As with any village mystery series, attrition is a constant problem. Happily, Penny replenishes the population by introducing new characters, including the very promising Gilbert family, who have bought the old Hadley house and plan to turn it into a luxury inn and spa. There may be bad blood between the Gilberts and Olivier, but that only adds to the social chemistry that's always on the bubble in Three Pines.