If all you're seeking for your summer reading is a good mystery with a fast pace and suspense that lasts, you could do far worse than "Bad Boy Brawly Brown," the 12th book and seventh Easy Rawlins story from Walter Mosley.

But just as there's a lot more to Mosley than Easy Rawlins, there's a lot more to the Easy Rawlins series than good guys and bad.

One of the wonders of Mosley is that he so consistently and successfully blends plot and character with substantial social commentary.

Elmore Leonard is unquestionably one of the finest crime and action writers of our time. In three dozen novels over 45 years, he has repeatedly given us characters and situations and shadings that felt so real it seemed he was merely recording them, not inventing them.

Billions in philanthropy ensure that many monuments to Walter Annenberg will remain when he dies, befitting someone who has achieved what he has. At 91, Annenberg is not only perhaps the greatest philanthropist of the century, but also one of its most accomplished figures.

Upon a base of insolvency, he built an impressive publishing empire anchored by TV Guide, which sprang from instinct and became a near monopoly in its field. Annenberg was no saint, but in "Legacy," Christopher Ogden's biography of Walter and his father, people attest to the son's strong moral center.

Before Colin Harrison begins rolling out the 400-plus pages of mayhem and gore in his new novel "Afterburn," he offers up an enormously telling quotation from Jean-Paul Sartre that begins, "Torture is senseless violence . . . "

It's not the quotation itself that's revealing, but Harrison's decision to include it.

Few circumstances are black and white in T. C. Boyle's collection of short stories, "After the Plague." Except Moira and Caitlin, that is.

They are heiress sisters who evoke Howard Hughes in the way that fabulous wealth can buy absolute insanity. Boyle introduces them via Larry, the gardener who's cultivating his own demise by furthering their design for a world devoid of color. They want all the grass, and flowers, and even the grand old trees on their property pulled up and paved over with blacktop.

From previous books, we know that Susan Cheever, a columnist for the Long Island newspaper Newsday, has suffered heavily under the yoke of alcohol, both as the child of author (and hard drinker) John Cheever and as an adventurous souse in her own right.

Perhaps this helps explain why, for her new book, she profiles history's most influential drunk, William Griffith Wilson, known to legions as Bill W., the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous.