Summer Reading.

Does "guilty pleasure" describe your idea of summer reading? If so, you may enjoy The Bishop in the Old Neighborhood (Forge, $24.95, 304 pp.), the latest in Andrew Greeley's Bishop "Blackie" Ryan series. Blissfully full of every ethnic cliche from the urban Catholic past, the novel even has a truly tacky quasi-sex scene; and with the discovery of three mutilated bodies in the sanctuary of St. Lucy's Church, it becomes a well-wrought police procedural. Greeley's charm lies in his affection for people--Captain Huong, the tough-talking female police commander, half Mom, half Mao, is particularly entertaining--and for the City of Chicago. His novel abounds in humor, high spirits, and the certitude that life is good and God is great.

Don Bredes's The Fifth Season (Three Rivers Press, $12, 312 pp.) lures us from Chicago to another notorious hotbed of murder and mayhem--Tipton, Vermont. Hector Bellevance is that staple of crime fiction, a disgraced cop (from Boston this time) quietly reconstructing his life in a small town. A decent man, handsome, with a good sense of humor and a bountiful vegetable garden: who could ask for anything more? (Many women, apparently, as his love life is erratic.) But Bellevance must abandon horticulture and return to sleuthing when a town father apparently commits two murders and vanishes into the woods. Bredes weaves a tangled, bloody, and exciting tale, the writing is terrific, and I absolutely loved it.

To round out this trio of mysteries, I would recommend Andrea Camilleri's The Shape of Water (Viking Books, $19.95, 224 pp.), a darkly humorous tale of ambition, betrayal, and greed under the hot Sicilian sun. Camilleri gives us the sleuth as sensualist. Where else but in an Italian murder mystery would the inspector pause to consume--or prepare--spaghetti with garlic and oil; friend red mullet; shrimp with lemon and garlic; even tender baby octopus? Pity the detectives in English mysteries, poor chaps, always grabbing a stale cheese sandwich and Nescafe. Yes, Salvatore Montalbano, the Sicilian police inspector-hero of Camilleri's novels, has it pretty nice. He is chef, moral philosopher, and lover of the beautiful Livia; he's a fearless, honest, and compassionate man with a palate every bit as subtle as his understanding of the world. As we watch him uncover the truth behind the death of a local politician, Camilleri envelops us in the scent and heat of Sicily, redolent of the sun, sea, and olive trees Montalbano loves. The Shape of Water serves up corruption and despair, honesty, and dignity, and an earthy relish for life, seasoned with a touch of bitter fatalism. It's a tasty treat.

I laughed my way through The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs (Anchor Books, $9.95, 128 pp.), another small treasure from the eclectic Alexander McCall Smith, whose work includes best-selling mysteries, short-story collections, and children's books. This amusing novel is the second in a trilogy starring Professor Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, author of the definitive tome on Portuguese irregular verbs and the most pompous scholar at the (German) Institute for Romance Philology. In a mistaken-identity plot whose zaniness defies summary, our hero, confused with a similarly named veterinarian, finds himself lecturing to hog and chicken farmers at the University of Arkansas, and later performing notably unsuccessful surgery on a dachshund. Mortified, he flees to Rome, where he has coffee with the pope and ends up being chased by a group of Coptic schismatics trying to steal the bones of St. Nicholas of Myra from their Patriarch, as a bevy of aggressively marriage-minded German widows keeps the pot aboil. Got all that? Just another day in the life of your typical philologist.

For a day in the life of your typical star defense lawyer, you can consult Edward Hayes's vastly entertaining autobiography, Mouthpiece (Broadway Books, $24.95, 286 pp.). Hayes recounts unpromising New York roots: his childhood in a tough Irish section of Queens; his abusive, alcoholic dad; his saintly, long-suffering mother. Yet Eddie prevails. By dint of brains, hard work, ambition, gall, chutzpah, and street smarts, he climbs the ladder to Assistant D.A. in the Bronx, and onward to a lucrative private law practice. Curious by nature, an astute observer of the human comedy, Hayes is a fastidious dresser with a low-life vocabulary, a devout Catholic with a high tolerance for sleaze, a tough guy who still calls his mother "Mommy." Sound like a character from a novel? Indeed. Hayes served as the model for Tommy Killian, the tough, fast-talking Irish lawyer in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. His account of his own rise to fame repeatedly violates that old caution, "Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back," and it's fun watching him flail away. In the glow of newfound celebrity, Hayes rubs shoulders with Rudy Giuliani, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, and Robert De Niro; marries a gorgeous supermodel and becomes the lawyer for Andy Warhol's estate; is driven into bankruptcy by double-dealing high-end thugs, but triumphs in the end. What a guy! Eddie doesn't need the money, but buy this book anyway. You'll love it.

If by now you've had your fill of light summer reading, you might turn to another memoir, Marian Fontana's A Widow's Walk: A Memoir of 9/11 (Simon & Schuster, $24, 422 pp.). Fontana, widow of a firefighter killed in the World Trade Center, writes movingly about love, loss, survival, and hope, documenting those dread days with remarkable candor and detail. The Fontanas were a close couple, loving parents of a young son, whose life together was destroyed on September 11--cruelly, their eighth wedding anniversary. Fontana, who became an activist on behalf of the survivors, captures not only the shock and disbelief of the first hours but also the emotional roller coaster that followed: the agonizing search for bodies, the endless funerals and political infighting, the clinging solidarity of survivors--and beneath it all, the "pain that runs deep and organic, to the center of the earth."

Finally, in Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague (Penguin Books, $14, 308 pp.), Geraldine Brooks, the Australian writer whose novel, March, won this year's Pulitzer Prize, transports us to a Hobbesian world where life was indeed nasty, brutish, and short--a seventeenth-century English village, besieged by bubonic plague, whose residents quarantine themselves from the world in order to halt the spread of a disease they see as a mark of God's wrath. Loosely based on historical fact, the novel is sustained by the heart and moral strength of its narrator, Anna Frith. After the deaths of her husband and two small children, Anna enters into a complex and richly drawn relationship with Michael and Elinor Mompellion, a charismatic pastor and his gentle wife. The three support one another in trying to quell the fear aroused by the relentless death surrounding them. Brooks's writing is inspired, her evocation of that long-ago world powerful and real. The redemptive ending she gives Anna's journey may seem improbable, but by novel's close, you care so much for Anna that you want it to be true.

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