If, unlike me, you find watching baseball to be about as stimulating as watching wall paint fade, then you can eschew the national pastime's forthcoming All-Star game and spend time instead with a veritable all-star team of crackerjack mysteries and thrillers by most of the genre's heaviest hitters. You won't care if you ever get back.

I'll drop the lame baseball metaphor in a sec, but this is just too good to pass up: First up -- are you ready? -- Alan Furst.

For decades now, Furst has been the absolute master of literary thrillers ("The World at Night," "The Foreign Correspondent") atmospherically set in the capitals of Europe on the eve of World War II. His latest, "The Spies of Warsaw" (Random House, $25, 266 pages) adroitly blends history and mystery and uses real and imagined period characters to outline the political, diplomatic and military miscalculations that helped make that war inevitable.

Furst begins in the fall of 1937 as Col. Jean-Francois Mercier, a world-weary widower and second-tier aristocrat serving as military attaché at the French embassy in Warsaw, works a small cadre of informants to discover where and when Hitler's mobilizing armies will strike first.

Despite evidence gleaned from his amateur agents, and from sources he cultivates in Polish military and social circles, Mercier's increasingly dire warnings to his superiors in Paris go mainly unheeded. Consequently, Mercier begins to take matters into his own hand, at great personal peril.

Although Furst's plot is uncharacteristically meandering, his characters, particularly Mercier and his very French, very complicated family, and a dashing Polish intelligence officer are vividly drawn.

Beyond that, Furst cinematically places us in the midst of exquisitely drawn settings, from Paris cafes to voluptuous Warsaw embassy parties to the deepest, darkest groves of the Black Forest at dusk. To wit: "Mercier felt the Parisian mystique take hold of his heart, a sudden nameless ecstasy in the damp air -- air scented by black tobacco and fried potatoes and charged with the restless melancholy of the city at the end of its day." For-mi-DA-ble!

Ruth Rendell's so-called psychological thrillers, usually written under the Barbara Vine pseudonym, leave me as cold as the murky pond where some emotional basket-case character inevitably drowns himself. But when Rendell, writing as Rendell, brings back her decent, insightful Chief Inspector Reg Wexford of the ostensibly bucolic Sussex town of Kingsmarkham, I settle in with a pint and a ploughman's.

In "Not in the Flesh" (Crown, $25.95, 303 pages), the 21st in this popular procedural series, a truffle-hunting hound gets things under way by digging up a decomposing corpse in a corner of Old Grimble's Field. When more human remains quickly turn up nearby, Wexford and colleagues have their hands full figuring out whether the bodies have anything to do with an ancient land dispute over Grimble's Field, or if it all goes both literally and figuratively deeper. A host of sketchy town and country suspects vex the venerable Wexford, but Rendell gives us an entertaining array of devilishly deceitful characters -- particularly the cantankerous John Grimble -- in the flesh, so to speak.

The equally well-regarded Elizabeth George's Inspector Thomas Lynley (of the PBS "Mystery" series bearing his name) is as superficially different from Wexford as his vintage Bristol 410 is from Wexford's squad car. Lynley is an aristocrat, albeit a reluctant one, from a titled family, and though he is frequently imperious and arrogant, especially toward his spunky working-class sergeant, Barbara Havers, his investigative instincts and insights are as dead-on as Wexford's.

Next page >