Lyndsay Faye's "The Gods of Gotham," and More In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" appeared in The New York Mirror; the New York Knickerbockers organized themselves into an official baseball club; and the New York City Police Department was established. There's nothing about Poe or the Knicks in Lyndsay Faye's rollicking historical novel, THE GODS OF GOTHAM (Amy Einhorn/Putnam, $25.95), but she does offer a sensational account of what early police work was like for those untested and ill-trained "copper stars" who patrolled the city in 16-hour shifts, trying to keep members of the populace from robbing, swindling, thrashing, raping and murdering one another. Timothy Wilde, the damaged hero of this juicy novel, reluctantly joins the force after losing his employment, his savings and half his face in the great fire that engulfed part of the city that summer. Making the rounds of the wretched Sixth Ward, with its lawless street gangs, abandoned children and ramshackle slums teeming with impoverished immigrants, proves a harsh education for Timothy. But he encounters new depths of depravity when 10-year-old Bird Daly alerts him to the activities of a serial killer in a black hood who is kidnapping and butchering child prostitutes - "kinchin-mabs," as they're known in the street slang called "flash-patter." While it may be true that "the urchins are lower in our society than the Jersey cows," even the most hard-bitten citizens are up in arms after Bird leads the coppers to a meadow on the edge of town (that would be Ninth Avenue and 23rd Street) where 19 bodies are buried. But this is a volatile period in New York history, and all it takes is a bogus confession from a vigilante who calls himself "the God of Gotham" to inflame passions about the waves of desperate immigrants fleeing the potato famine in Ireland and importing their despised Roman Catholic "popery" to Protestant New York. Faye's canvas is a crowded one, with vibrant characters jumping out of the plot to contribute local color. Timothy's older brother, Valentine, a police captain and a Democratic Party stalwart given to "narcotics, alcohol, bribery, violence, whoring, gambling, theft, cheating, extortion" (but a terrific sport, for all that), best embodies the roguish spirit of the emergent city. It was Valentine who taught Timothy how to talk "flash," which gains him entree into brothels and thieves" dens and a rehearsal of "The Thrilling, Gruesome and Bloody Spectacle of the Battle of Agincourt" being produced by a gang of newsboys. Now there's a spectacle for you. One never knows what might happen when a writer lets his inner imp out of the bottle. C. J. Box does just that with FORCE OF NATURE (Putnam, $25.95), an excellent wilderness adventure that stiffens the backbone of a series that was getting a little soft. Joe Pickett, the nice game warden who keeps stupid hunters from maiming themselves or blasting at animals with automatic weapons, gallantly plays backup for his falconer friend Nate Romanowski in this violent, bloody and quite satisfying thriller set in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming. Box has always dropped hints about Nate's black ops military history, but the full story comes out now because the psycho commander of their elite unit has turned on his former apprentice and is on a mission to take him down. Assassins keep coming out of the woods, and Nate keeps killing them - at one point, with an arrow in his shoulder. But all those bodies call down the law, which spooks Nate. "I'm not accountable for anything except to my own code," he insists, "which is how I want it, because I trust my code more than any set of laws." Whether you buy that philosophy or not, it's still a rush to follow this rogue warrior on a journey that takes him across three states and ends on a mountain littered with corpses. Joe R. Lansdale slips into his folksy storyteller persona in EDGE OF DARK WATER (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $25.99) to spin a charming Gothic tale narrated by a feisty schoolgirl and set in East Texas around the time of the Great Depression. After May Lynn Baxter, a local beauty who longed to become a movie star and was "a kind of goddess" to the children in these rural parts, is pulled from the Sabine River with a Singer sewing machine weighting down her bloated corpse, 16-year-old Sue Ellen, her friends Jinx and Terry, and Sue Ellen's laudanum-addled mother steal a raft and push off down the river, heading for Hollywood with May Lynn's ashes and a sack of stolen money. With a posse of evil men (including Sue Ellen's abusive stepfather) at their backs, they have an adventure as funny and frightening as anything that could have been dreamed up by the Brothers Grimm - or Mark Twain. In his upsetting psychological thriller, THE CHILD WHO (Penguin, paper, $15), Simon Lelic takes a baleful look at the matter of murderous children. After 12-year‑old Daniel Blake kills an 11-year-old girl named Felicity Forbes in an "excruciating" manner, the citizens of his hometown in southern England are transformed into a howling lynch mob. Not content with attacking Daniel's parents, people turn their rage on his lawyer, Leo Curtice, who dares to feel compassion for the terrified boy. Even Leo's wife suggests that "maybe he doesn't deserve to be defended at all." Leo resigns himself to the abuse - until his teenage daughter goes missing. And just when you think Lelic has said all he intends to say about society's hysterical fear of violent children, he gives the subject one last, diabolical twist.