Sleepyhead
By Mark Billingham
310 pages
William Morrow
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As the modus operandi in serial killer procedurals grow more and more grotesquely baroque, the genre's tendency to fetishize those killers becomes more and more obvious. What's refreshing about the British comedy writer Mark Billingham's "Sleepyhead" is that this debut novelist comes up with a genuinely creepy premise without being unpleasant. More important, he doesn't lose sight of the victims.

The psycho in "Sleepyhead" is drugging young women as a prelude to inducing stroke, leaving them in a state of permanent coma. The most remarkable passages in the book are the inner monologues of Allison Willets, the killer's sole "success" (i.e., the only one of his victims who doesn't die -- she's conscious, but she can't speak and can barely move). It's here that Billingham shows his knack for comedy. Allison's voice has a "what next?" exasperation that manages to be darkly funny without slighting the horror of her situation.

Allison's doctor, Anne Coburn (one of those smart, ultracompetent, no-nonsense women that some mystery writers are so adept at and whom readers love), devises a way of communicating with Allison involving the young woman blinking her eyelids. Allison remarks: "Just call me the Amazing Performing Eyelid Woman! Only I can't sodding well perform, can I? ... I was screaming at my eyelids inside my head. It felt like the signal went out from my brain. But slowly. It was some dodgy old Lada beetling along the circuits, or whatever they're called ... It was on the right road and then it just got stuck at roadworks somewhere. Like it lost interest. I know I can do it but I haven't got any control over it. When I'm not trying I'm blinking away like some nutter, but when I want to I'm as good as dead." At their best, Allison's monologues have some of the otherworldly strangeness of the heaven sections of Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones."

The revelation of the killer's identity and motive are, frankly, a prosaic letdown after the extremity of the crime. And Billingham takes risks in making his cop hero, Detective Inspector Tom Thorne, so pigheaded and off track for most of the investigation, though it's easy to imagine Thorne becoming a companionable protagonist (the next of the Thorne books, "Scaredy Cat" is already out in the U.K.) and Billingham's control of character and plot becoming more sure. He's off to a remarkable start.

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Tart Noir
By Stella Duffy and Lauren Henderson, eds.
309 pages
Berkley Prime Crime
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An outgrowth of the Web site tartcity.com, this collection of short stories by a lineup of some of the most prominent female mystery writers vindicates the site's exasperation with women characters as tokens or frail damsels in distress. The collection was edited by Stella Duffy, author of the Saz Martin mysteries, and Lauren Henderson, author of the Sam Jones mysteries, and they've managed to corral an impressive array of their colleagues to contribute.

Henderson's "Tragic Heroines Tell All" imagines Phaedra, Medea and Lady Macbeth spilling all on a talk show. The author's trademark cheekiness is in evidence but also a fine satirical idea: how the Oprah-ization of feelings and experience reduces grand passions to nothing more than piddling neuroses. Duffy's "Martha Grace" is a cruel and rather obvious object lesson redeemed by the sinister fairy tale mood. Among the other highlights are Jen Banbury's "Take, for Example, Meatpie," in which a mysterious and larcenous young woman moves from junior high to junior high, finding the most picked-on boy and providing him with a sexual education. It's not the follow-up to Banbury's debut, "Like a Hole in the Head," that some of us have been waiting for, but it's a sexy -- and pleasingly perverse -- entry.

Even sexier and much, much darker is Val McDermid's "Metamorphosis." In her introduction to the story McDermid says she has stayed away from writing about sex because it's so tough to do. Well, the only sweat that shows in "Metamorphosis" is the sweat covering the lovers' bodies. And the eroticism of McDermid's writing here is matched by the twisted ending, which has the muffled deadliness of a brick wrapped in a towel.

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