BOOKS: The Ethical Assasin, David Liss (2006)

David Liss's earlier novels have been historical mysteries, set in 18th-century London (A Conspiracy of Paper and A Spectacle of Corruption) and 17th-century Amsterdam (The Coffee Trader); this is his first novel in a contemporary setting.

It's not all the way to present-day; the setting is Florida in the mid-1980s, where 17-year-old Lem is selling encyclopedias door-to-door, hoping to make enough money to pay for college. He's surprising even himself by turning out to be a good salesman, which is making it even harder to cope with his incipient guilt about talking people who don't have much money into buying things they really don't need. He's in a tiny middle-of-nowhere trailer, having spent hours making his pitch to another couple; just as he close the sale, a man comes into the trailer and kills the couple.

The killer -- he refers to himself as an "assassin" -- is Melford Kean, and he's surprised to find Lem there. Melford offers Lem a simple deal: Stay quiet, and you'll be safe; go to the cops, and you'll take the fall for the killings. Things are never that simple, of course, and over the next several days, Lem finds himself caught up in Melford's world, trying to save his own skin. The relationship between them is more complicated than you'd expect, and Melford presents Lem with philosophical conundrums that he'd never contemplated before, involving (among other things) vegetarianism, pig farming, and the real purpose of prisons.

It's hard to read a crime novel set in Florida these days without thinking of Carl Hiaasen, and there is something of Hiaasen in this novel, especially in the large cast of vividly eccentric characters -- the not-quite-a-bimbo personal assistant who's haunted by the ghost of the conjoined twin who didn't survive their separation; Lem's potential love interest, a sexy vegetarian from India who sells encyclopedias with him; the head of a crystal meth ring who's managed (so far) to sublimate his pedophilic desires into the "mentoring" of young men. But where Hiaasen is bright and zany, Liss is darker and more disturbing; there's comedy here, but it's in the background, subordinate to the suspense and the tension.

Liss's historical mysteries are fine books, and it's a joy to see him do equally well with so different a story and setting. I can't wait to see what he gives us next.