Spark, Muriel. Symposium.

NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

This is my latest attempt to try to figure out just what it is about Muriel Spark’s novels that get her so many points with the critics. There’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, of course, which is marvelous, but I haven’t really been that impressed by her other works that I’ve read so far. So I keep reading, and wondering.

Nesbo, Jo. Headhunters.

NY: Random House, 2008.

I sort of have a thing about Scandinavian mystery and suspense fiction and I read quite a lot of it, but Nesbo is a new one to me. This gripping, dead-run yarn features Roger Brown, a corporate headhunter — by his own reckoning, the best of his kind in Oslo, the “king of the heap.”

Grafton, Sue. V Is for Vengeance.

NY: Putnam, 2011.

The first book in this bestselling series about the cases and adventures of California private detective Kinsey Millhone was A Is for Alibi, published in 1982, which was the protagonist’s “real time.” Now, twenty-nine years later, it’s only 1986 in Kinsey’s world. Grafton has said that her decision not to have her heroine age at the same rate as the author (and her readers) was largely to avoid the complications of personal computers, cell phones, AIDS, terrorism, and all the other major changes in how we do things.

Heyer, Georgette. The Corinthian.

NY: Dutton, 1966. (Originally published as Beau Wyndham, 1941.)

Though she has since had many copiers, Heyer was the inventor of the “Regency romance” and over a long career she rang all the changes on the theme. Some of her novels set in England in the very early 19th century were sweetly romantic, some were coming-of-age mini-epics, some were even more or less serious explorations of the lack of freedom, to say nothing of life options, facing a young woman of good breeding in those days. This one, though, is a flat-out romp, the sort of thing that would have made a terrific Hollywood script back in the 1930s.

Block, Lawrence. The Burglar in the Closet.

NY: HarperCollins, 1978.

This is the second novel in the series about Bernie Rhodenbarr, gentleman burglar. The first book was pretty good, and the later installments are quite good, the author having developed the character and his circumstances in more thorough detail, but this sophomore effort is really pretty weak.

Paton Walsh, Jill. The Attenbury Emeralds.

NY: Minotaur Books/St. Martin, 2010.

This is the third novel Paton Walsh has written featuring the characters created by the late, great Dorothy Sayers. The first, Thrones, Dominations, was by “Sayers and Paton Walsh,” and it was excellent. The second was A Presumption of Death, by “Paton Walsh and Sayers,” and it was pretty good. This one is by Paton Walsh alone and it’s . . . well, not quite a failure, but it has significant difficulties that make it a considerable disappointment.

Wambaugh, Joseph. Hollywood Hills.

NY: Little, Brown, 2010.

The author’s method with the “Hollywood Station” series, of which this is the fourth installment, is to gradually develop one or two plotlines involving more serious crimes, whether white-collar or drug-addled, and to alternate the complex working-out of those with numerous anecdotes (which Wambaugh famously collects from cops everywhere), character sketches (both cops and bad guys), and mordantly funny episodes.