Angel Baby, by Richard Lange (Mulholland Books; Little, Brown); $26.00

Now that Luz has weaned herself off Oxycontin, Xanax, Vicodin and Valium, her “stoned princess” act is just that. To finally escape her violent drug lord husband Rolando, known on the street as El Príncipe, she has to have her wits about her. She’d tried to escape once before, and Rolando beat her nearly to death. But she has to escape. She left her daughter, Isabel, with an aunt three years earlier, thinking it would be temporary.  Luz knows if she doesn’t make it out of Mexico this time, she never will.

Rolando would have been angry enough had she merely escaped. But before she left, she also cleaned out his safe and shot two of her guards. He has spies all over Tijuana, any one of whom would love to earn the gratitude of El Príncipe.

To get across the border, she enlists the help of a drifter relying on alcohol to blot out the guilt he feels over the death of his daughter. Malone is unreliable at best, and is no match for Jerónimo Cruz, the murderous hit-man Rolando has hired—while keeping Cruz’  family locked up as collateral—to bring Luz back. Luz and Malone are also up against a corrupt Border Patrol cop who knows about the money Luz is carrying and wants it for himself.

Richard Lange does a terrific job of drawing complex characters, most of whom have a core of goodness despite the evil they do. This is a taut, exciting thriller.  But it made me more convinced than ever that I never want to step foot in Tijuana.

The 9th Girl, by Tami Hoag (Dutton; $26.95)

That high school girls can be self-centered and cruel is certainly not news. But one always hopes that their victims have someone who has their backs. Sadly, no one had Penny Gray’s back. So it took several days for her mother to even realize she was missing. And even then, she didn’t care.  

When the body popped out of the trunk of a car on New Year’s Eve, the limo driver who hit it thought he’d seen a zombie. Immediately nicknamed “Zombie Doe,” Minneapolis detectives Nikki Liska and Sam Kovac act on the assumption that the young woman was the ninth victim of a killer they’ve dubbed Doc Holiday, due to his penchant for killing young women on holidays. Problem is, the killer has been snatching girls in one city and dumping them in another. The victim could have been from anywhere.

But as it turns out, Zombie Doe was a local girl. As Liska and Kovac try to solve the details of her horrible death, they learn that her life was just as tragic. And meanwhile, Doc Holiday is carrying out his plan to claim another victim.

Tami Hoag’s The 9^th Girl is a taut police procedural. Adding to the tension is Hoag’s spot-on depiction of nasty teen cliques and the fear that keeps even kind teens from standing up to them.  “I promise you,” Liska tells her teen-aged son, “you won’t die of high school.” Reading this, one can see why some teens might not believe her.

This is a terrific thriller.

Bad Monkey, by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf; $26.95)

The honeymooning tourists who had chartered the fishing boat expected to catch tuna. What they didn’t expect was to reel in a human arm. The arm was all that was left of Nick Stripling, who died leaving his wife a large insurance policy and lots more in offshore accounts.

The local sheriff doesn’t want the publicity from the case to tarnish the image of the Keys, so he asks suspended detective—now county restaurant inspector—Andrew Yancy to hand it over to the Miami-Dade County cops.  They pass, but the medical examiner tells Yancy that there’s something fishy about the arm--the amputation was not caused by a boat propeller or shark bite. When Yancy learns that the owner of the arm had been a Medicare swindler, he figures solving the case might just be his ticket back to the job.  

But wait: that’s only the main plot of Bad Monkey, Carl Hiaasen’s latest. I didn’t bother to count, but he has innumerable other plots working at the same time. There’s the sad case of Neville, whose family’s possession of a Caribbean beach goes back centuries, but is put off his land by a developer. There’s the mysterious shooting of a young man who worked on the fishing boat where the arm was found. And the many calamities that prevent Evan Shook from selling his spec house—the one that towers over Yancy’s own. Characters?  There’s the Dragon Queen, a smelly voodoo woman whose lovers die mysteriously when they try to break up with her; Bonnie Witt, nee Plover Chase, wanted for indecent liberties with a minor in Oklahoma, now hot for Yancy.  And Driggs, the nasty little monkey of the title, whose increasing addictions cause his hair to fall out and his behavior to worsen.

Yancy is the central character, and like other Hiiassen characters, he will stop at nothing to stand up for what he believes is right. If this puts him outside the law, so be it. In this case, he stands up for his right to enjoy seeing the moon at night, for building codes being enforced, for clean restaurants free of insects and rodent droppings, for old timers to be able to live on their land, and for bad guys to get caught.

The book starts off humorously, but in the end, it suffers from too many plots, too many characters—some with more than one identity—and too much chaos.  I actually found it tiring—there was simply too much going on. And I wasn’t alone: another a die-hard Hiaasen fan quit about ¾ of the way through and asked me just to sum up what had happened to each character. It is telling that I had difficulty remembering.

I love Hiaasen’s books, but I sure wish he’d limit himself to just a few plots per book.