The premise is unthinkable: Chief Constable Andrew Dalziel, "Fat Andy" of the Mid-Yorkshire Police, is dying. Fans, just like the fictional folk in Reginald Hill's long-lasting series, will refuse to accept even the possibility. Fat Andy is indestructible and indefatigable, and he'll go on forever.

That's the groundwork for Hill's brilliant novel about the nasty new world of post-9/11 and, in Britain, 7/7 (when home-grown terrorists blew up the London subway). In this environment, everything and everyone is altered and expendable; even a rock like Dalziel can be blown up.

The story begins with the explosion. Peter Pascoe is summoned on a bank holiday to Dalziel's side at a video store, where a man with a gun may be holed up. The location is also flagged as a potential hot spot because it's owned by an Anglo-Arab. As Dalziel and Pascoe dicker over what's going on, the block blows up. Pascoe, protected by the chief constable's considerable bulk, is uninjured, but Dalziel's injuries are life-threatening. Pascoe takes control of the investigation, but is immediately outflanked by a new anti-terrorist investigative unit: CAT. Then a new group emerges, calling itself the Templars. And it has a mole in CAT.

The plot is dense and full of holes, but nobody will much care. What Hill is really writing about is the end of innocence in the mystery novel. The Fat Man, deep in his coma, dreams of bygone days. Pascoe, drinking tea overlooking a lovely garden with a beautiful woman, sees a fleeting image of "old England." The New England, with its mixture of races and classes, is reality. That's the subtext of Death Comes for the Fat Man. Police work, even in Yorkshire, is now a more complicated job, and a puzzle-plot, even a fictional one, has a lot of loose ends. If the Fat Man survives, it will be to face a newer, harsher world, one in which a pint and a bacon buttie aren't enough to fend off death.

Ann Cleeves deserves a lot more attention than she gets. Her plots are beautifully crafted; her characters are intense and deeply drawn. She's also a real mistress of setting, taking us right into the scene of the action. All of those qualities shine in Hidden Depths, one of her best.

The opening is harrowing. Julie Armstrong is a thirtysomething divorcee returning home from a night with the girls. She's moderately tight and feeling quite sexy. She's just encountered an old school friend and the sparks were certainly there. So it's in a bit of a haze that she goes into her bathroom and finds her teenaged son dead, exquisitely laid out in the bath with flowers and fragrant scents. Inspector Vera Stanhope of the Northumberland CID and her team are on the case, but there are no clues. Then a second death occurs with the same stylized touches, but there seems nothing linking the two victims. The stylized posing indicates that the same person killed both, but why?

Cleeves weaves her story through the viewpoints of many characters. There is Stanhope, overweight, middle-aged and career-oriented, but also Julie Armstrong, a stylish yuppie wife and a group of self-absorbed, bird-watching men. Cleeves never lets up on the suspense in this very complex puzzle, and the end, when it comes, is less surprise than relief. Hidden Depths is masterful storytelling.

Whatever became of Porfiry Petrovich, the detective who ferreted out Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment? If you believe A Gentle Axe, he went right on solving cases in St. Petersburg, squabbling with the bureaucracy and generally getting on with his career.

The story begins when a destitute former prostitute, Zoya, finds a small miracle in the midst of the Russian winter. Searching for wood in Petrovsky Park, she comes upon a dead man, hung like a scarecrow on a tree. Buried at his feet in the snow is a leather suitcase. It also contains a dead man, this one a dwarf.

Zoya, who has seen worse, takes a deck of pornographic cards from the body of the dwarf and a huge wad of rubles from the scarecrow. There will be comforts and joys in her household tonight. Someone else can "discover" the dead.

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