The epidemic of doll-on-doll crime is a fading memory, as real in America's collective memory as the crack epidemic and the O.J. Simpson trials, and all that's left is for the books to come out, letting us look back at those terrible tragedies that riveted the nation. Books like Ann Rule's "The Vinyl-Coated Killer" and Joe McGinnis' "How, Now, Mistress Doll" were excellent contributions to the genre. Now, "The Dollhouse Murders" adds a different perspective by telling the story of six deaths through the eyes of the investigators.

Author Thomas P. Mauriello has taken pains to disguise the names and locations of these crimes, to the point of changing the detective's name to "the Detective." But no matter, these stories retain their dark edge of madness and tragedy, and the plethora of crime-scene photos adds a visceral kick in the gut to even the most jaded true-crime aficionado.

Doll-on-doll crime may occur on a smaller scale, but that doesn't make them any less horrific. There's the attempted robbery at the family store. Amid the cash register and grocery shelves, two men lay dead. We follow the detective as he works the scene, attempting to deduce the chain of events that led to the tragedy: a cracked pane in the pastry case; the pattern of money thrown from the till; the splatter of blood-like paint by the corpses. These are the red threads that must be knitted together to create a satisfying narrative.

Readers interested in learning step-by-step how a scene is "processed" will see that there is no one right method of working, and explains why some crimes don't get solved, how guilt cannot be proven. Clues are gathered using observation, intuition and an intimate knowledge of forensics, such as the way blood gathers where the body meets the floor, or what the size of the entry wound implies. Miss a clue, and the narrative will still be created, but it won't be accurate. Fail to look around at the right time, or fail to keep an open mind as to suspects, and you have another JonBenet Ramsey case on your hand.

Murder freezes a moment in time and the detective is its archivist. "The Dollhouse Murders" opens a window into the lives of dolls, seeing them at work and at home, in places we never see. By placing their deaths in the context of their lives, Mauriello is also issuing a plea for empathy and tolerance, in effect, putting a human face on the vinyl victims. But even more, these are taut, grim tales of violence and death, told with an eye for observation and an ear for detail that recall the best of Joseph Waumbaugh, Ed McBain and Elmore Leonard. These stories pack a punch. And Judy.

Lev Raphael has written short stories and novels dealing with Jewish, Holocaust and crime, and "The German Money" can be seen as a distillation of all of them. He lets the story unfold slowly, giving the reader time to become acquainted with the characters before reaching deep into the emotional undertow and bring to the surface the tensions that bind and divide a family.

Paul's journey into his past doesn't reveal everything, and Raphael resists tidying all the loose ends, giving "The German Money" a necessary messiness that reminds us that ties of blood and kinship are not keys into the realm of perfect knowledge. Sometimes, we simply have to go on as best we can, and let the secrets be.

The Regency period in England's history has been a fertile field for romance writers for a long time. While writers such as Amanda Quick and Marion Chesney have long crossed the genre boundary by introducing crimes to solve, it's only in the last decade, since the late Kate Ross introduced the elegant crime-solving fop Julian Kestrel, that mysteries have found a home in the time of the madness of King George.

There has also been a number of attempts at sequels and prequels to the books of Jane Austen, so it should come as no surprise that someone should attempt a mixture such as that found in "Pride and Prescience," the debut of a series featuring Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, last seen getting married at the end of "Pride and Prejudice."

Carrie Bebris' novel continues their story, picking up literally after the Darcy's double wedding with Elizabeth's sister, Jane, and Charles Bingley. At the reception, Bingley's sister, Caroline, announces her engagement to Frederick Parrish, a wealthy landowner from Louisiana. Their whirlwind courtship and marriage prevents the Darcys from returning to his estate, Pemberly, and they stay in London for the wedding.

Soon after the wedding, a series of frightening incidents casts a pall over the newlyweds. A horse bolts underneath Caroline. The Darcys' find her walking dazedly through the London streets by night. She apparently tries to kill herself by slitting her wrists. The family wonders if she is going mad and they agree to carry her off to Charles Bingley's country home, to rest and to be treated by Parrish's friend, Professor Julian Randolph. Readers of Gothic novels will discern the pattern this story is treading.

"Pride and Prescience" is a story of nots and knots. The story is not bad, but there are no surprises and no interesting scenes to linger over until you reach the inevitable unmasking of the villain. Except for the conflict between Fitzwilliam's belief in rationality and Elizabeth's in intuition, the Darcys act more like a long-married couple rather than newlyweds needing to adjust to new and unique circumstances. The prose hews to the Austen style, its rough edges smoothed, without committing any serious solecisms, but it also lacks Austen's wit and observations, a point made clearer when you compare the quotations from "Pride and Prejudice" that head each chapter.

Bebris takes care not to offend Austen fans, but without taking risks, there are also no rewards. "Pride and Prescience" might appeal to Austen fans who want to spend a little more time in the company of her characters, but may be disappointed that more wasn't done with them.

There should be a statue of limitations on complaining about our parents and what they did or didn't do to us or for us. By age 30, after we've gotten our noses bloody a few times and wallowed in as much pleasure as our bodies and bank accounts can stand, we may have learned just enough to realize that either our parents knew more than we're willing to admit, or that they were truly hopeless and more to be pitied than to be censured. And that should be it. Time to grant them absolution and move on.

Then, there are the cases like Paul's. His father bore the scars of being orphaned early in his life; his mother was a Holocaust survivor who came to America, married and left her past in Europe. He realizes that they were not the stereotypical Jewish families: "We were anything but lively and outspoken, not a perpetual carnival of conversation at all. Dad could be social and glib, but not with us, never with us. And serious subjects just weren't on our map."

With his sister and brother, Paul grew up in a home ruled by mysteries, subject to his mother's sometimes implacable silences and inexplicable anger. Small wonder he fled the urban jungle of New York City for the wilds of Michigan to escape his past as well. He had hoped he could abandon his Jewish heritage, his fiancé, Valerie, and bury himself in his dead-end job as a university librarian.

But Paul is drawn back to New York City after his mother dies of a heart attack, and he learns that, of his three siblings, he alone would inherit "the German money," the compensation his mother collected and never spent. The amount, nearly a million dollars, creates a split in the family, and Paul -- beset with a form of survivor's guilt -- becomes consumed with learning why he was chosen.

But unlike Nick Hoffman, the college professor turned detective in Lev Raphael's witty and acerbic mystery series, Paul is no investigator. His quest to divine the secret of the German money moves in fits and starts, in between coping with his sister's claims on his inheritance, his father's Alzheimer's and his attempts to rekindle his relationship with Valerie, who, it turns out, has some secrets of her own.

Raphael has written short stories and novels dealing with Jewish, Holocaust and crime, and "The German Money" can be seen as a distillation of all of them. He lets the story unfold slowly, giving the reader time to become acquainted with the characters before reaching deep into the emotional undertow and bring to the surface the tensions that bind and divide a family.

Paul's journey into his past doesn't reveal everything, and Raphael resists tidying all the loose ends, giving "The German Money" a necessary messiness that reminds us that ties of blood and kinship are not keys into the realm of perfect knowledge. Sometimes, we simply have to go on as best we can, and let the secrets be.

The most interesting story in "The Emperor of Ocean Park," the big-buzz debut thriller by Stephen L. Carter, takes place before the book opens.

It concerns Judge Oliver Garland, who in his long career on the bench shifted from a Thurgood Marshall liberal to a Clarence Thomas conservative, suffered when his teen-aged daughter was killed by a hit-and-run driver, and was rejected for a seat on the Supreme Court when he was caught lying about his friendship with the gangster Jack Ziegler.

Carter's book opens with the Judge -- as he is known even by his children --found dead in his study from a heart attack. His son, law school professor Talcott Garland, learns at the funeral that the Judge had made "arrangements" of some kind before he died. Clues surface: a pawn from the Judge's chess set is delivered to him, and Talcott receives a message that "Angela's boyfriend" contains the key to the arrangements.

Talcott is understandably mystified by all this. Unfortunately for him, other people are also interested in these arrange­ments, including Ziegler, and while he promises to protect the family until they are found, Talcott does not trust him, especially after he is stalked and attacked. Surviving long enough to learn what the Judge was up to provides the Macguffin behind this densely written 657-page thriller.

As a professor of law at Yale and the author of several best-selling and well-received non-fiction books, Carter sets the story in his world, and he describes the world of the black upper-class with the nuanced eye of an anthropologist. It is a land separate but equal from what Talcott repeatedly calls "the paler nation." It is a world where the children go to Jack and Jill, grow up to attend Howard University, enter politics, the media or finance, vacation on Martha's Vineyard and hold season tickets to Redskins games. The world of wealth, privilege and power is a staple of political thrillers, but seeing it through a black man's eyes give it an unusual freshness.

Carter also infuses the story with themes drawn from his non-fiction books. Talcott is a Christian who is challenged to stay true to his faith; a teacher concerned with the proper education of his students and surviving the backstabbing found in academia; a father looking back at his relationship with the Judge and determined not to repeat it with his son; and a husband unable to control his suspicions about his wife's fidelity. These scenes, described by Carter's polished, measured sentences, make up the bulk of the book. The rest is thriller filler, complete with car chases, gunplay, late-night warnings phoned in and cat-and-mouse games with the villains and the police.

Be warned: there are two Carters in this book. One is the social observer who sees a cocky student as "young, white, confident, foolish, skinny, sullen, multiply pierced, bejeweled, dressed in grunge, cornsilk hair in a ponytail, utterly the cynical conformist, although he thinks he is an iconoclast." The other delivers clumsy if-I-had-but-known foreshadowings, and give the gangster lines like "I have asked my question. I have delivered my warning. I have done what I came to do."

"Emperor" goes out of its way to make it a tough book to like. The thriller elements don't thrill. Watching the slow-motion disintegration of Talcott's marriage provides more interest than a car chase. Worse, the characters are annoying. Talcott is a self-loathing and humorless drip whose introspective monologues give him an unearned gravity. His wife, a beautiful, ambitious attorney angling for a seat on the court of appeals, is a harridan and a viper. The rest of the family and the other characters range from the delusional to the unpleasant.

Balanced against that is the prose, the observations, and the obvious intelligence behind it all. You want to root for Carter to succeed, and when he tells us in drips and drabs, the story of a judge drawn to an evil act and its soul-corroding effect on even the innocent and unknowing, you get the payoff of the novel that's swaddled within

The Rome of the Vespasian's time may be ancient to us, but it's home to Marcus Didius Falco, the emperor's informer and hero of "Time to Depart," the seventh book in this series by Lindsey Davis.

The departure in the title is that of Balbinus Pius, the godfather of Rome's underworld. Convicted of a capital crime, he is given "time to depart" under law to escape execution. Return to the city would mean death.

Shortly thereafter, the city is hit with a number of grandiose crimes: a market is emptied of valuable goods, the goldsellers are robbed in daylight, and, worst of all, men connected with Balbinus' trial are found tortured and killed. Falco finds himself in the center of these troubles in a number of ways. The goods he bought overseas on behalf of his father were among the stolen goods, and his best friend, Petronius Longus, was the officer who put away Balbinus. On behalf of the emperor, he must help his Petro determine who is seeking to replace Balbinus, as well as secretly determine who in the empire's version of a police force, may be on the take.

Falco is also troubled by domestic matters when he finds that his lover, the daughter of a Senator who cannot marry him under law, is pregnant. Apart from the legal troubles (which, irritatingly, are neither resolved, nor did it turn out as threatening as Falco thought), he also needs to find a home, both for his expanding family and a mongrel dog determined to join them.

One of the pleasures of visiting a historical world is in seeing just how different it is from our day. The world of ancient Rome did not have autos or phones, windows or locks on doors. A high-rise meant a five-story building. You didn't walk down certain streets, especially after night, or you had a retinue of club-wielding slaves that you hope will protect you when needed. Family links were not just optional, but vital, even when its members were undesirable (and Falco's extended family provide him with a great source of frustration, from his neer-do-well father to his lazy brothers-in-law). Graft, prostitution, murder, influence peddling and organized crime are not modern inventions by any means, but in a world measured on the human scale, these are take on an intimate, almost claustrophobic quality. Falco's world is smaller than ours, who can live in one city and drive to another to work, and "Time to Depart," for all its grand scope, is also an intimate novel.

It's also a longer novel than needed. When the crime wave breaks out and no suitable candidates for the role of instigator offered, it becomes apparent what's going on, and suspicions are confirmed after about 275 long pages. After that, events pick up speed, and the resolution of most of these threads are efficiently weaved in the book's remaining 125 pages, concluding with a wedding (not Falco's) which will either leave you shaking your head at the licentiousness of ancient Romans, or remind you of the receptions you attended.

Michael Connelly's "City of Bones" - his latest procedural about L.A. police detective Harry Bosch - is a book I would love to
recommend. Connelly's des­criptions of L.A. and police work are convincing, and like other books in this genre (po­lice procedural, existential hero division), there's the se­rious voice that tries to imply that there's something going on underneath the story. There's even something of a love story and a climax that suggests major changes in Bosch's life.

The story starts out with a bang, too, with the discovery of the bones of a long-dead child in a residential wooded lot. This attracts the cast of characters usually seen in the City of Angels: the publicity hungry coroner who brings along her camera crew, the police and press helicopters hanging overhead like sinister fireflies, the reporters using means fair and foul to gain ac­cess, the police department higher-ups putting pressure on Bosch to solve the case fast.

Bosch, too, is a fine study of the angst-ridden detective with a past. He's not too over­bearingly morose to inspire suggestions of Prozac and a long rest. He's good at what he does and dedicated to his work for a reason. As Bosch puts it, "It's the feeling that this won't just go by. That those bones came out of the ground for a reason. That they came out of the ground for me to find, and for me to do something about. And that's what holds me together and keeps me going."

The case proceeds with the usual twists and turns, as Bosch digs back into the boy's past and uncovers the people who would like to see the case and the body re­main buried. Connelly's a for­mer police reporter, and he uses his eye for detail to build a convincing portrait of big-city police work's alternative culture, and how the relative­ly simple task of detecting can be bent and sometimes sabo­taged by the media, budgetary constraints and simple incom­petence.

Yet, "City of Bones" left me cold. While Connelly is good at recording the visible de­tails, the invisible ones trip him up. This is especially troublesome when they in­volve major plot points - and readers who wish to read the book anyway should skip this and the next paragraph. One officer tries to make herself a hero by attempting to kill a chase suspect and wound herself, only it goes wrong and she dies. Her death is heartfelt and sad, but the reason Bosch ferrets out - "she said she hoped to get a chance to be a hero one day. But I think there was some­thing else in all this. It was like she wanted the scar, the experience of it" - doesn't ring true. Ending his explanation with, "I don't know. I guess every­body's got secrets," comes off as lame.

Another spoiler: The book ends with a major change in Bosch's life for which the motivation is equally as confusing. The resolution of the murder results in Bosch resigning the depart­ment. Again, the reader asks, why? Was he af­fected by the officer's death? It didn't seem that way. Is he tired of the office poli­tics? Given the evils that he's seen on the job, I can't imag­ine that would be the case. Yet, nothing makes sense.

"City of Bones" is all effect and no cause. It's well-writ­ten, tightly paced and a quick read, but it's best not to think about it too long after you close the covers.

"Off the Planet" is Jerry Linenger's memoir of the five months he spent aboard Mir, the Russian space station, but whether or not you will enjoy reading it depends entirely on how you get along with Linenger, a world-class contender in the Narcissism stakes.

While he claims his ego is only moderate compared with other jet jockeys, he is -- for once -- being modest. He believed early on that nothing is worth doing if it can't be done in public. He tells of watching the Apollo 11 astronauts walking on the moon and how he wants to be just like them, not for the adventure or thrill of exploration, but because of the attention they drew. When he was selected to join NASA, he didn't just phone his wife and say, "Honey, I'm in." No, he waited until just before their plane took off for their vacation and had one of the pilots make the announcement.

If you can set Linenger's ego aside for a moment -- and you know it would take a bulldozer and a couple sticks of gelignite to do it -- you'll find that he's written an excellent, richly-detailed account of his experiences in Russia and in space.

The U.S.-Russian joint effort came very close to being one of NASA's biggest failures. Originally designed to last five years, the station had been up for 11 and was literally falling apart. Warning alarms went off regularly. Hoses split, releasing antifreeze that the astronauts breathed. Devices broke down. There were numerous power failures. Garbage and broken equipment built up because there wasn't enough room in the spacecraft to get rid of it. Russian mission controllers lied to the astronauts about the dangers they were facing, berated them for failures that were not their fault, and treated the American astronauts like idiot step-children.

Then there were the life-threatening accidents. During Linenger's time aboard, a fire broke out in the equipment supplying oxygen. Despite the efforts of six men, it burned uncontrollably for over 15 minutes before putting itself out. Not only was no investigation held to determine its cause, but the Russians minimized the damage and blamed the astronauts. This censor-and-blame attitude wouldn't have been countenanced in NASA, but for the sake of U.S.-Russian relations, they went along with it. If the fire hadn't burned itself out, there would have been six dead men in space, and NASA Administrator Dan Goldin would have been held responsible for putting American astronauts into danger. It's clear from Linenger's account that only the heroic actions of the astronauts and cosmonauts kept the station running for as long as it did.

The book goes into great detail about the nuts-and-bolts of life aboard Mir: the sounds, the smells, the daily schedule and relentless work needed to keep her flying. Linenger is a generous host, willing to reveal everything. One of the more fascinating sections described his earth-observation duties. Driven by his desire to become "a world-class geographer," he goes into detail about how he accomplished his goal. I'm fascinated about how some people can do so much while others -- myself included -- do so little. Time management, for me, is limited to finding a watch I can wear longer than two weeks. Watching Linenger at work is worth more than any motivational speaker.

"Off the Planet" is an admirable book. Linenger is an excellent storyteller, and writes clear prose. He describes the scientific and technical aspects in terms understandable to the general reader. But, unwittingly perhaps, he also provides a glimpse inside Jerry M. Linenger, M.D., Ph.D., and shows us the seed inside his egotism. His galaxy-sized self-regard can be annoying on the page, but from it came his ability to accomplish much. It drives him to be the best at whatever he's doing, no matter what. And as a result, for five month, it really was Jerry's world, and we were just along for the ride. After that harrowing voyage of the near-damned, he's earned his bragging rights.

Walt Disney lives.

No, I'm not talking about the urban legend about him being cryogenically sealed and stashed below the Pirates of the Caribbean exhibition. Nor is this some soft New Ageism about spirits inhabiting the celestial plane.

He's alive down on a plot of land outside of Orlando, Florida, a boom city that was a dumpy little crossroad when Walt began buying what became a 30,000-acre spread there is the late 1960s.

Walt's gone, but his vision and energy lives on, and once you start dipping into "Since the World Began," you'll see that the scope of his vision is nothing short of awesome.

There are many faces of Disney, the producer of family-friendly and highly profitable movies, the creator of family-friendly theme parks, but also a visionary who thought that, as one associate put it, "bad information was responsible for all the evil in the world." Who tried to change people's attitudes within the confines of an amusement park, the man whose idealism spawned the Epcot center, and under Michael Eisner, the Disney Institute, where education and learning are on a par with entertainment.

What the book won't tell you -- this is published by Hyperion, Disney's publishing arm, and written by Jeff Kurtti, a longtime Disney employee -- is just what hell Walt went through to realize his vision. You won't hear of Disney's fundamentalist upbringing, his retreat into fantasy to escape a brutal father and life in poverty, his endless hard work to make animated movies, his multiple nervous breakdowns. His brother Roy is idealized as the business brain behind Walt's success, but you won't hear that Roy constantly opposed Disney's ideas as a waste of money. When Kurtti writes that Disney founded the design firm Walt Disney Imagineering in 1952 "because he realized that he wouldn't be able to create Disneyland within the boundaries of the studio system," he doesn't mention that it was also because Roy and the Disney board refused to advance Walt the money to design Disneyland, fearing that it would be a failure.

There was plenty of reason for Roy to be worried, too. Disney's ideas constantly threw the company perilously close to bankruptcy, generally on the order of every 18 months, until Disney's deal with ABC in 1955 made him very wealthy and put the company on a firm financial footing. Walt Disney was an idealist and a visionary, and if it wasn't for his tenacity, the company would not be the worldwide giant it is today.

Even while ignoring those shadings, there is still plenty of story left to make "Since the World Began" an awe-inspiring overview of Walt Disney World. It's probably the single largest and most complex construction project this side of the space shuttle. Its statistics are jaw-dropping: 55 miles of canals and levees were built to control the water levels, nine acres of underground corridors thread through the park, housing sewer lines, pipes and cables, and a pneumatic system for hauling trash, 60,000 plants and 800 varieties of trees acquired, moved and transplanted to build the park, 100,000 pounds of linen had to be washed every day.

As befitting its creator, the theme park was ahead of its time in its use of innovative technology. WDW was also the first area to implement 911 service in Florida, the first commercial venture to use fiber optic cables, the first telephone system using underground cable instead of overhead wires.

But the park was also a reflection of Walt Disney's vision of a global coming together of different peoples and cultures, learning about each other and attempting to find and enjoy peace as a result. It's globalization with a human face, to borrow someone else's phrase, and even if it seems outdated or even impossible in this post-9/11 world, Walt's beliefs is a hopeful and sustaining vision, and as American as the culture from which it sprang.

Part company history, part seminar on the process of creation, "Walt Disney Imagineering" is a vivid, sometimes eye-opening guide to the imaginative spirit that drives the Walt Disney empire.

Disney started this subsidiary in 1952 and gave it the job to design and develop Disneyland. Despite his success as an animator, he was untested in running a theme park, and he was unable to get his company's board of directors to invest in what back then seemed an outlandish idea ("dreams offer too little collateral" Walt ruefully confessed at the time). "WDI" reprints the initial maps of the park, and with each repetition, we see Disney's dreams growing, from the 11-acre Riverside Drive property originally envisioned to the 50-acre park it eventually became.

To those who only see the finished product on film or in the stores, the amount of detail and effort that goes into creating the Disney universe is astonishing. Every element must be drawn or modeled, and the Disney creative process demands that each design go through several iterations, sometimes through substantial changes. The result is a gallery of ideas and images, worked in painting styles both impressionistic and realistic. Elaborate models are created, such as the gym-floor sized Epcot layout or the six-foot tall "Tree of Life" that towers 13 stories over Disney's Animal Kingdom in Orlando. Not surprisingly, the Imagineers have grasped computer modeling with the same enthusiasm they have put in everything else they do.

Some of the best pictures describe projects that never were. A ski resort in Northern California. An entertainment center in Burbank. A "House of Cheese" design for a proposed food pavilion at Epcot. But these are not complete wastes of time and money. Projects that were interrupted for one reason may be revived and continued for another. For Disneyland Paris, artist Tim Delaney reworked Sleeping Beauty's castle into a three-towered art nouveau structure modeled on Mont Saint-Michel that looks as stunning and startling as the Eiffel Tower must have looked to Parisians a century ago. Even a Ferris wheel designed in 1954 was revived 40 years later for Disneyland Paris.

"WDI" gives the impression of a corporate culture that demands creativity, and pays for it by encouraging exploration and curiosity. The book is exuberant and unabashed eye candy for Disney fans, a treasure trove of artistic styles and an inspiring guide that describes what it takes to take an idea and see it through to the finished product.