While winter gasps its last chill and before we're drawn into the invidious vernal vortex, there's time to curl up on a cold evening. Several new novels from writers well-known and brand-new offer compelling reason to stay by the fire.

The most enticing is Michael Pye's "Taking Lives" (Knopf, 304 pages, $23). The premise sounds hackneyed: amateur detective tracks down serial killer. The execution is anything but. Told in rarely (correctly) used second-person narration, "Taking Lives" chronicles the bizarre journey of a Dutch exchange student, Martin Arkenhout, who, at 17, finds himself inexplicably yet inevitably on the wrong side of murder. Along an alligator alley in Florida, Arkenhout switches identities with his victim, setting in motion a decade of cataclysmic events.

Arkenhout changes identities at will -- via gruesomely methodical murders of men with good credit, lives they haven't lived as well as Arkenhout believes he can, and who, most importantly, won't be missed.

When Arkenhout makes a critical blunder in his choice of victim, the tale shifts provocatively into the narrative told by John Costa, British-born son of a dying Portugese immigrant, who has a complicated childless marriage and works for a major museum in London.

A significant -- and politically delicate -- acquistion of paintings goes missing; the Museum sends Costa to Portugal in pursuit of answers, art and Arkenhout. What transpires has the taut pacing of a damned good thriller melded with exceptional storytelling of an intensely literary nature featuring art, politics, secrets and lies.

Pye takes an over-the-top idea and brings it to exquisite fruition in a not quite unexpected yet still startling climax. He offers many intricate pleasures in this book, not the least of which are lush language, keen evocation of place (America, the Caribbean, Netherlands, London and Portugal) and a deep sense of what men whose lives are built on lies feel when no one appears to be watching.

Art plays a pivotal role in Carolyn See's "The Handyman" (Random House, 240 pages, $22.95). See, known for her stylish novels of post-modern American life, here proffers a briskly crafted tale of how what we feel inextricably links us to what we do.

The answer to the question "What is Art?" is often rooted in "What to paint?" Fledgling painter Bob Hampton, See's fine-tuned and winsome protagonist, finds himself unable to answer the latter question and so, at the very gates of his artistic future, deserts a course of study at Paris' famed Ecole des Beaux Artes, returns to Los Angeles and spends the summer working as a handyman while he compiles his admission portfolio for the far less tony Otis Art Institute.

Hampton imagined a simple summer of painting and plastering; he's called on to fix much more: clean house for a despairing housewife, save a drowned toddler, help a gay couple fresh from Ohio deal with AIDS and death, teach a young mother to drive, clear out a dead professor's belongings for his widow.

At season's end, Hampton heads back to school, still unsure what to paint -- a problem he explores with an established artist and his novelist wife. Through that exchange, Hampton, like Dorothy apres Oz, sees art comes from within, and is off to paint his first successful piece -- on the concrete surrounding a client's pool.

See's narrative is fresh and Hampton (and other characters) has a genuine voice, but See damages this otherwise quite smooth novel with a prologue that, although brilliantly conceived, is poorly executed and only serves to confuse the reader who has yet to enter the territory of the novel and also spoils the suspense. My advice: Skip the prologue till book's end.

American history, though brief, is not uncomplex. Marnie Mueller's "The Climate of the Country" (Curbstone Press, 305 pages, $24.95) details one of its most unsavory moments, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The setting is Tule Lake Japanese American Segregation Camp in northern California; the protagonists Denton and Esther Jordan, a young American couple -- he a working-class conscientious objector and she the politically minded daughter of Jewish intellectuals.

Mueller was born and raised for several years in an internment camp to parents much like the Jordans, This highly autobiographical novel conversely brings the era vividly and painfully to life while also exhorting an unfortunately righteous and somewhat anachronistic tone.

One can argue, as has been done recently about Arthur Golden's "Autobiography of a Geisha," over the problems inherent in so-called "appropriation" of another ethnic group's history -- especially if that history is as painful as that of Mueller's narrative.

There's a bit too much of the good liberal white folk in this book for comfort, yet the story remains remarkably compelling. Worth reading, particularly for Mueller's attention to historical detail, the politics may leave one queasy.

The historical foundation for Thomas Berger's "The Return of Little Big Man" (Little, Brown, 448 pages, $25) argues such politics far more successfully as it chronicles the further adventures of Jack Crabb, protagonist of Berger's most successful novel, "Little Big Man."

Crabb -- whom readers thought dead last time around -- has resurfaced and is up to his usual tricks, torn between the white boomtown West and the Cheyenne who raised him.

Starting with Crabb's survival at Custer's Last Stand, Berger takes Crabb (and the reader) on a breezy frolic through a Zane Grey-style history: the murder of Wild Bill Hickok; life in the boomtowns with Bat Masterson, the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday; and a tour of Europe with Buffalo Bill Cody that includes tea with Queen Victoria.

Although Berger offers no great insights into life or human nature, he offers -- like a multi-hued strand of wampum -- a remarkable string of small, perfect moments. "Return" proves a well-researched and rollicking read told in the vernacular of the day.

"The Pollen Room" by Zoe Jenny (Simon & Schuster, 144 pages, $20) also employs the vernacular of the day -- more's the pity, as adolescent angst ain't what it used to be. The narrator, Jo, suspended between high school and college, reunites with the mother who abandoned her as a small child. Instead of finding herself, Jo finds only more isolation and alienation (and drugs and sex), ultimately choosing to return to her father, only to find he has remarried and that his new wife is pregnant.

Abandoned by family and friends, Jo is left aimless and alienated, a state for which first-time novelist Jenny offers no solutions, but much self-indulgent cant.

Victoria A. Brownworth is the author of five books and editor of seven. She has taught writing for over 15 years. Her most recent collection of short fiction, "Night Shade" (Seal Press) will be published this spring.

Pub Date: 03/21/99