Just listen to this: “The days march by and extraordinary things happen all around us. Small miracles, haphazard events, bursts of joy, revelations. … We hunker down in our daily lives, in the shelter of routines and assumptions. We miss so much.” That gorgeous authorial voice belongs to James Sallis, who seizes on such moments in SARAH JANE (Soho Crime, $23.95) and shows us what makes them precious in the eyes of his title character, Sarah Jane Pullman. She’s the daughter of a chicken farmer in Selmer, a small town on the border between Alabama and Tennessee, and the subject of this spellbinding character study.

After a harrowing youth and a stormy adolescence that brings her before a judge (“Go to jail, or join the armed forces”), Sarah Jane returns from the Army with enough training to earn her living as a cook. That skill sends her on her peripatetic way through nameless towns, meeting and losing forgettable men, until she lands in Farr. (“Legend had it that there’d once been twin towns but Nearr had up and moved away.”) Here she becomes — of all things — a sheriff’s deputy and, eventually, the sheriff, whose duties range from visiting patients at the old folks’ home (“small ceremonies help hold our lives in place”) to cleaning up after the suicide of yet another victim of “the unreasonable silence of the world.”

Guilt about a righteous but unlawful killing hangs over Sarah Jane, driving both her self-destructive behavior and her acts of atonement. But while she accounts for the soul of this narrative, Sallis’s uncanny insights into the secondary characters contribute to his collective portrait of her world. A missing teenager found caring for an old woman with cancer speaks to the discreet goodness in these reserved country people. A 10-year-old boy who killed his entire family wakes from a coma looking for his sister, providing a look into the quiet madness that can trigger violence. Even a letter from the mother who deserted Sarah (“I’m leaning into the wind, and the wind’s blowing hard”) sounds like a piece of stormy poetry.

♦

When you’re in the mood for a tasteful ivory-tower mystery, John Sandford isn’t the first name you think of. But here he is, in BLOODY GENIUS (Putnam, $29), writing jauntily about a murderous professional rivalry over “the relationship of medicine to culture.” Not only that, he’s assigned the case to one of his bad-boy bruisers, Virgil Flowers, an investigator with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. The victim is an eminent scholar; the scene of the crime is a college library; and the murder weapon is a DreamBook Power P87.

Although Sandford doesn’t slavishly follow genre protocols (except for an abundance of red herrings), he seems familiar with the petty ways of academics who bury their noses in books and don’t get enough sun. To keep up his tough-guy reputation, Virgil throws some good punches, but this smartly plotted mystery might be too tame for readers who already have tenure.

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Martin Edwards’s GALLOWS COURT (Poisoned Pen, paper, $15.99) seems awfully bloodthirsty for a traditionally designed mystery set in foggy old London in 1930. Rachel Savernake, the daughter of a dearly departed “hanging judge,” is determined to carry on the family legacy. “The judge is dead,” she declares, “but I inherited a taste for melodrama.” So when a woman’s body is discovered in Covent Garden but her head turns up elsewhere — and in a trunk — the atrocity prompts Rachel to exercise her sleuthing skills. Little does she know, or care, that the author’s designated detective is Jacob Flint, an eager-beaver reporter for a not entirely respectable newspaper.

Rachel and Jacob dance around each other, but theirs is not a romantic relationship. Fans of clean-cut heroes will be rooting for Jacob, although some of us would rather see devilish Rachel clean his clock. Either that or commit a clever, more refined murder of her own.

♦

Beaumont is a bustling city on the Gulf Coast of Texas. But in 1973, when Lisa Sandlin’s irresistible mystery THE BIRD BOYS (Cinco Puntos, paper, $16.95) is set, it’s a place where a newly minted private eye like Tom Phelan shouldn’t expect to get many high-profile assignments. Indeed, when Xavier Bell hires Phelan (and his bright young secretary, Miss Delpha Wade) to find his estranged brother, Rodney, it seems like a routine job — that is, until Phelan comes to suspect that one of the brothers is a murderer. The big question is: Which one?

The plot is classic, but it’s enhanced by a colorful cast of regional characters and their delectable chatter. Walk into the police station and you’ll be told to “set your behind in a chair, you.” Ask someone to describe the Storyville district in New Orleans, back in the day, and you’ll hear that “it was a place. Quite a place. And then it wasn’t anymore.” And an old customer of the shop the aptly named Sparrow brothers once owned in the Crescent City will tell you they kept birds in gold cages hanging overhead to attract customers: “It was like colors were singing.”