Murder Intercontinental

Of these 20 stories, which take place all around the world, the best are those in which the substance, as well as the setting, is exotic. Shizuko Natsuki accomplishes this when depicting how ""The Sole of the Foot"" links a bank robbery at a Japanese resort town to the suicide of a temple employee. Barbara Callahan's ""The Mists of Ballyclough"" considers how a young man's gift for ""storifying"" can both weave a magical world and destroy a life. On a whimsical note, Hayford Peirce's Kansas-born PI, who is scrounging a living in Tahiti, must find (without help from the great and powerful Oz) ""The Missing House"" that the owner swears was stolen--and not by a recent cyclone. In Batya Swift Yasgur's ""Kaddish,"" set in the U.S., a cop who is a nonpracticing Jew investigates the shooting death of a rabbi and finds himself facing the same sort of question that troubled the victim: Just how stringently should one follow the law? Some household names also make welcome appearances, as Ruth Rendell's Chief Inspector Wexford and Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret follow crime trails in their native countries and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot visits an Egyptian archeological dig. Collectively, the volume portrays a worldful of crime, a prospect mitigated by the spectacle of a worldful of engaging, quirky sleuths and their inventive creators. (Dec.)