Wealth of whodunits

Running into an old friend can be a pleasant surprise. But it isn't for Ben Hartman.

On vacation in Switzerland, Ben, an American investment banker, crosses paths with college friend Jimmy Cavanaugh, who promptly produces a pistol and tries to shoot him.

Why? It's a mystery to Ben, too, in "The Sigma Protocol," the 23rd thriller by Robert Ludlum, who died in March.

While Ben is on the run, someone is stalking Anna Navarro, a Justice Department field agent investigating the deaths of old men with one thing in common: CIA files marked with the enigmatic word "Sigma." Ben and Anna meet by chance and try to help each other sort things out -- and survive.

"The Sigma Protocol" is among the latest hardcover novels of mystery and suspense, which include books by Anne Perry, Robert B. Parker, Patricia Cornwell and Stuart Woods.

In Victorian London, Perry's Inspector William Monk investigates when two female corpses are found in the studio of a famous artist, in "Funeral in Blue," No. 11 in the series. One of the victims is Elissa Beck, whose physician husband, a colleague of Monk's wife Hester, is the prime suspect. The Monks try to save the good doctor from the hangman's noose, aided by a family friend who has a crush on the recent widower.

Parker is famous for his 20-plus mysteries featuring Boston private eye Spenser. However, in Parker's latest whodunit, "Death in Paradise," the detective is Jesse Stone, police chief of Paradise, Mass. In this third book featuring Stone, he takes action after a "floater" is found in a lake. The victim is a young girl who was shot, and Stone's only clue is a man's school ring on a gold chain found with the body.

Ready for a "crime satire"? That's the billing for Cornwell's "Isle of Dogs." Kay Scarpetta, the medical examiner in Cornwell's best-known series, has been put on ice for now as Cornwell offers this third installment in another series, which features Virginia State Trooper Andy Brazil and his boss, Superintendent Judy Hammer. Brazil takes to the Internet to foil a gang of highway pirates. Meanwhile, Tangier, an island in Chesapeake Bay, revolts when the governor installs speed traps and orders helicopters to apprehend offenders.

In Woods' "Orchid Blues," Police Chief Holly Barker of Orchid Beach, Fla., and her steady, Jackson Oxenhandler, are preparing for a wedding-honeymoon trip when they're interrupted by a bank robbery that becomes murder. The case is more complex than it first appears, so Holly enlists the aid of her father, a former military man and a crack shot; a friend from the Miami office of the FBI; and Daisy, her faithful Doberman (on sale Monday).

In other mysteries, a pair of shadowy men-for-hire have new adventures: Burke escapes an assassination attempt in New York and flees to the West Coast, where he takes a job searching for a runaway teen, in "Pain Management" by Andrew Vachss; and Repairman Jack gets unwanted publicity when he subdues a gunman in the New York subway, in "Hosts" by F. Paul Wilson.

In Russia, a rock star is kidnapped, a serial killer stalks the Moscow subway and a police detective rides the rails to Siberia in search of a historical document, in "Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express" by Stuart M. Kaminsky; while in Victorian Paris, Sherlock Holmes and a female rival detective investigate the brutal murders of two women, in "Chapel Noir" by Carole Nelson Douglas.

A journalist investigates when a body turns up in a back yard on a private island in Connecticut, in "The Cold Blue Blood" by David Handler; and a journalist who frequently criticized the police is murdered in "Blood Sinister," Cynthia Harrod-Eagle's eighth book featuring Police Inspector Slider.

In "Past Tense," William G. Tapply's 18th book in the "Brady Coyne" series, a woman disappears after being questioned about the murder of a man who had been stalking her. And in "Bloodroot" by Susan Wittig-Albert, No. 10 in the series has herbalist China Bayles visiting the family plantation in Mississippi, where an old property deed surfaces and the man who found it disappears.

Shady doings are afoot in "Shades of Murder," Ann Granger's English-village tale of two elderly sisters suspected of poisoning a young stranger who claimed to be a distant relative; and in "Killing the Shadows," Val McDermid's story about a psychology professor who tries to identify the serial killer of -- crime novelists!