Summer Reading.

Murder, arson, and reclusive movie stars make Robert Eversz's Burning Garbo (Simon & Schuster, $23, 271 pp.) excellent beach reading. This noir caper featuring thirtyish excon Nina Zero, the gentle and toothless Rottweiler who adopts her, and an assortment of Los Angeles types will get your blood running. Add to your getaway bag Ruth Dudley Edwards's Carnage on the Committee (Poisoned Pen Press, $24.95, 400 pp.) and you may never leave the shore. The latest adventure of Robert Amiss, a nice young man who is awfully good at solving mysteries, and his old friend and mentor, the cigar-smoking, deeply politically incorrect Baroness "Jack" Troutbeck, is simply, smashingly, brilliantly funny. Edwards is a former staffer for the Economist and this, her second poison valentine to the publishing business, will have you craving more.

If memoir is your preference, satisfy your appetite with Extra Virgin, by Annie Hawes (Perennial/HarperCollins, $13.95, 337 pp.). Two English sisters, tired of rain and fog, take jobs in a small hill town near the Italian Riviera, where they charm, and are charmed by, the locals. Out exploring one day, they come upon an abandoned rustico, or peasant hut, complete with an olive grove. Much to the incredulity of the neighbors, they buy the dump and move in. Fifteen years and some renovations later, they are still there. Ms. Hawes's memoir of her life in Diano San Pietro is not merely affectionate and interesting, it is also very, very funny. And if you are on a diet, do not read it while you're hungry.

You would have to be dead or from outer space not to be offended at least once by Christopher Buckley's latest offering, Florence of Arabia (Random House, $24.95, 253 pp.). Is it the State Department or the CIA that supports Florence Farfalletti's bold plan to bring freedom to the women of Mutar (pronounce it "Mutter") and Wasabia through the medium of television? Dangerously politically incorrect, full of Washington-insider froth, and as fresh as today's headlines, Buckley's take on what is wrong with us, the Middle East, the CIA, the FBI, Catholics, Baptists, and others too numerous to mention, will help make your afternoon at the beach positively delicious, if not delirious.

It may be tempting to think of the characters in Maggie Estep's Gargantuan: A Ruby Murphy Mystery (Three Rivers Press, $12.95, 260 pp.) as down-and-outers, but that would be to badly underestimate horse-lover Ruby Murphy and her friends Attila Johnson, Ed Burke, Big Sal (whose wife can't cook), and the animal-loving psychopath Ben Nester, plus a horse named Darwin and a dog named Crow. Estep treats us to murder, madness, and some droll commentary on modern life as well as a good look at the seamier side of the sport of kings. The ambience is Coney Island and several race tracks; the voices alternate in telling the story, and you will be sorry when it ends.

Killing Cousins, by Alex Minter (Pocket Books, $9.95, 130 pp.), features the cousins Morris and Simon Apple, two New York real-estate-rich kids with a nasty family history. In this cool, very contemporary mystery, the wives of two Texas billionaires are murdered in an Apple-owned hotel and it is up to the hip, urban--but, oh shucks!, emotionally scarred--duo of Felix Novak and Soraya Novarro to find the killer. Everybody packs a Glock or a Magnum and menace hangs in the air, but Minter leavens it with some excellent wisecracking humor and a dash of romance.

Yes, you can go home again, at least in Martin Clark's The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living (Alfred A. Knopf, $24, 345 pp.). Take Judge Evers Wheeling, who travels from semialcoholic misery and despair in a small Southern town to what looks, at the end, very much like redemption and contentment. Along the way are some stunningly original voices, fall-off-your chair hilarity, mysterious strangers, dolts, con artists, a surpassingly vengeful and faithless wife, disappearing money, a devoted brother, and a smart, sexy black lady lawyer who literally charms the pants off Judge Wheeling. It's quite a trip. Highly recommended.

Baboons are not an endangered species, so when human venality causes disease and death in a baboon troop, Robert M. Sapolskey is among the few to voice concern. A neuroscientist who has spent years studying baboons in Kenya, his A Primate's Memoir (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, $14, 304 pp.) is written with wit and brilliance from life in the field. How he gets from Brooklyn, where he grew up surrounded by loving and devoutly Socialist relatives, to the Serengeti plains, where he names his baboons out of the Old Testament--Benjamin, Saul, Daniel, Sarah, Rebecca--is a story that holds you, entertains and disturbs you, and makes you laugh. Sapolskey does not shrink from sharing his opinions on exploitation, corruption, poverty, and ignorance, but his tone is more conversational than polemical. Then there are his adventures, recounted with earthy delight (and wonder that he survived it all). They read like the script for a Woody Allen movie. Imagine the vegetarian Sapolskey, alone at his camp, being visited by some poachers who insist on giving him the leg of a freshly killed zebra for his dinner. How far from Brooklyn can you get?

Marshall Browne's The Wooden Leg of Inspector Anders (St. Martin's Griffin, $13.95, 240 pp.) won Australia's Ned Kelly Prize in 1999. It is the darkly atmospheric tale of a Roman police official wearied by all the corruption around him and by the loss of his leg to an anarchist's bomb. Inspector Anders takes on one last assignment, to a nameless city in southern Italy, in what is expected to be the rubber-stamp closure of an investigation into the murder of an anti-Mafia judge. His meeting with the judge's obsessed and grieving widow turns everything on its head, and the inspector slowly comes alive again to the possibility that good may triumph, even if temporarily, over the evil in the Italian state. The climactic scene in which the local mafiosi close in on the inspector is bone chilling and unforgettable.

Lauretta O'Connor, Commonweal's former office manager, lives in Fairfield, Connecticut.