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It is fitting, then, that the plot of Thomas Perry's latest Jane Whitefield novel, Blood Money, begins in the Keys. I can think of no more successfully restless writer than Thomas Perry. His heroine, a sort of walking, talking witness-protection program, moves people in peril into new lives. To elude the various killers who are always on her and her charges' tails, she flies and drives many different planes and cars all over the country, constantly adopting and discarding clothes, credit cards, hair styles and habits. Identity itself is in flux, as she takes apart the personae of those in danger and formulates new ones. She establishes safe houses, transfers funds, then plays the innocent until she can smash a trunk lid down hard on a limousine driver/criminal's head. She tricks someone on every other page, never repeating herself. In Whitefield's world, there are far more than 50 ways to leave your pursuer -- in the dust.

Blood Money By Thomas Perry Random House, 355 pages Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com Outcast By Jose Latour Akashic Books, 217 pages Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com Garden of Evil By Edna Buchanan Avon Books, 319 pages Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com A Miracle in Paradise By Carolina Garcia-Aguilera Avon Books, 277 pages Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com

"Blood Money" introduces a super-accountant for the Mafia called Bernie "the Elephant" Lupus who has been kept a virtual prisoner in a secluded compound by a beach for years. After he fakes his death, he and his young housekeeper end up with Whitefield. Lupus has been keeping in his head records of investments for the major New York, Pittsburgh, Boston, New Jersey, Chicago and New Orleans crime families, and he is now the only one who knows where billions of dollars of mob money is. He and Whitefield, with the help of a fellow who has similarly fantastical financial skills, plan to give the money to charity, which is, of course, a lot more complicated than it sounds.

I love the Jane Whitefield books, and "Blood Money" is as fast-paced and readable as any, but it is, unfortunately, not quite up to the high standards Perry has led us to expect. His mistake is to spend too much of his narrative time with a capo named Delfina, one of the many mobsters whose money is being given away. Unlike the other families' operations, Delfina's is scattered across the United States, and he and his men move constantly. Although his analyses of situations are sophisticated, they often sound like pale versions of Whitefield's. As the "Godfather" and "Goodfellas" era melts into the "Sopranos" sunset, you've got to give us more than that.

Outcast, by Jose Latour, starts out in Cuba and ends up in Miami. To be more specific about how this shift occurs would neutralize the first of the many about-faces that the plot takes. Latour is a Cuban crime writer who still lives in Cuba, but "Outcast" is written in English. The combination may be what makes Latour sound so authoritative about both shores.

His hero, Eliot Steil, is the product of a Cuban mother and an American father whose business kept him in Cuba for a while and whose obsession with a shrewd, coldhearted Cajun later kept him away. As the book begins, Steil the son is working as an English teacher in Havana. There he appears to be a bit of a sad sack, but when he reaches Florida, he turns out to have many Felix Krull-like qualities; presumably the United States releases them in him. He is soon getting ahead thanks to deals with one corrupt cop and various criminals, all of whom come in handy when he tries to figure out why an American stranger would have come out of the blue to kill him before he reached the States.

Latour's tone is fascinating. Crime novels tend to be either moralistic or hiply amoral with a satiric or leering edge. Latour's vision is amoral, but matter-of-factly so. To him it makes perfect sense that a man who would become an English teacher in Cuba would become a thief in Miami. And Latour's criminals may not have hearts of gold, but they don't go around killing or double-crossing one another, either. They're businessmen -- very curious (and persuasive) Cuban versions of what businessmen must be.

The one drawback is all the detail about the characters' pasts that is not essential to the plot. There is really too much of it for genre fiction. But the prose is surprisingly smooth. It is Latour's dispassionate eye, not his language, that gives him away as a foreigner.

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