"The Yard" by Alex Grecian, and More Admit it, Victorian mystery fans. We've been spoiled by the rigorous scholarship of writers like Peter Ackroyd, lulled by the formal elegance of stylists like Anne Perry. In short, we've lost touch with the lurid traditions of the 19th-century potboiler. Consider THE YARD (Putnam, $26.95) a crude corrective to those literary leanings. This deliciously trashy first novel by Alex Grecian walks the genre back to the era of Jack the Ripper with its bloody tale of a serial killer who is systematically butchering detectives from Scotland Yard's recently formed Murder Squad. "Jack was the first of a new breed," Sir Edward Bradford, the police commissioner who created this elite division, remarks. He opened a door to certain deranged possibilities and there will be more like him. Two upstanding if rather dull police officers take the lead on the case, but you're better off watching Dr. Bernard Kingsley, the pioneering forensic pathologist who cleans up the primitive procedures at the London morgue and does clever things with the promising new science of "finger marks." Grecian has a talent for capturing gory details, and his revolting rendering of one of Dr. Kingsley's autopsies is outdone only by his extremely vivid (and strangely moving) account of a murder. Given this natural aptitude, it doesn't seem to matter so much that the author introduces historical references awkwardly or that his use of the period vernacular is untrustworthy. Bounding from the workhouse to the lunatic asylum to the stinking streets, he does outstanding descriptive work on the mad and the maimed, the diseased and the demented. Children receive his special ­attention. There are cameo appearances by a little match girl, dead of phosphorous poisoning, and a small boy trapped in the chimney of a rich man's town house, as well as a more comprehensive account of the suffering of one poor child who survives the horrific experience of being "adopted" by a murderer. If Charles Dickens isn't somewhere clapping his hands for this one, Wilkie Collins surely is. There's nothing like an old building with yellowed newspapers taped to the windows to stir a child's imagination. Nine-year-old Jess Hall, one of the narrators of Wiley Cash's mesmerizing first novel, A LAND MORE KIND THAN HOME (Morrow/HarperCollins, $24.99), gets up the nerve to spy on the religious services held behind those papered-up windows - and he'll regret it the rest of his life. It takes two more storytellers to fill in the narrative about the River Road Church of Christ in Signs Following and its charismatic pastor, Carson Chambliss, a man so evil he scarcely seems human. Adelaide Lyle, the elderly midwife in this Appalachian town, comes forward to reveal the truth about how Miss Molly Jameson died. "The snake bites bothered me the most," Miss Adelaide recalls of her churchgoing days. The third narrator, Sheriff Clem Barefield, is aware of how Pastor Chambliss got those terrible burns all over his body. But only Jess knows why his autistic older brother died on the very day he was taken into the church, and it's his voice that we carry away from this intensely felt and beautifully told story. Sheriff Walt Longmire, the Wyoming lawman who keeps the peace in Craig Johnson's broad-shouldered Western mysteries, is scouting scenic locations in the Northern Cheyenne nation for his daughter's wedding in AS THE CROW FLIES (Viking, $25.95) when he sees a woman plunging off the face of Painted Warrior cliff with an infant in her arms. Although he's way out of his jurisdiction and in the doghouse with his daughter, Walt agrees to take time to mentor Lolo Long, the new tribal police chief, on what turns out to be a case of murder. Walt continues to be excellent company because he's always keen to learn something from the strong Indian characters in this series, starting with his friend, Henry Standing Bear, whom we have come to know and respect as "the thing that scared the things in the dark." This time a wizened old medicine woman takes Walt in hand, guiding him through a Native American Church peyote ceremony deep in the woods. And while he doesn't feel the urge to "go off into the forest and follow the little animals" after nibbling on a peyote button, he does have a vision that expands his mind and helps him solve the case. Librarians don't need to raise their voices to be heard, so it's appropriate that Eleanor Kuhns, who works in a library in Orange County, N.Y., should adopt a hushed tone for her first novel. A SIMPLE MURDER (Minotaur, $24.99) takes place in a New England Shaker community in the late 18th century, the destination of an itinerant weaver named William Rees who has come in search of his runaway 14-year-old son. Skilled weavers are always welcome in these parts, even in a sheltered society, so Rees is allowed to stay and work while he makes peace with his child. That puts Rees on the spot when pretty and pampered Sister Chastity is murdered and an outsider is needed to conduct an objective investigation. His interviews with the industrious Shakers take him into every corner of their community, from the central meetinghouse to the simple burial ground where graves are marked with trees, not headstones. Kuhns's intimate voice and all-seeing eye make this seem an exotic world indeed. But she also shows that greed, envy and materialistic values are nothing if not universal.