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BLACK MASS, In the spring of 1988, Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill set out to write the story of two infamous brothers from the insular Irish enclave of South Boston: Jim "Whitey" Bulger and his younger brother Billy. Whitey was the city's most powerful gangster and a living legend--tough, cunning, without conscience, and above all, smart. Billy, president of the state Senate, was a political heavyweight in Massachusetts. These facts alone make for an intriguing story, but as Lehr and O'Neill found out, this was only the beginning.

John Connolly, a rising FBI agent and fellow "Southie," had known the Bulgers since boyhood when Whitey rescued him from a playground fight. After investigating organized crime in New York, Connolly was reassigned to the bureau's Boston office in 1975, and was determined to make a name for himself by relying on his old connections. He succeeded in a big way by lining up Whitey as an FBI informant in an effort to bring down the Italian Mafia--a major coup for both the FBI and Connolly. In exchange, Bulger received protection. Though heavily involved in extortion, intimidation, assassination, and drug trafficking, Connolly's "good bad guy" did not receive so much as a traffic infraction for over 20 years. In time, however, the deal changed, and information began flowing the other direction, with Bulger manipulating Connolly and a small group of co

WHEAT FIELD, The innocence of the mid-century makes the sex somehow smuttier in the latest Upper Midwest thriller from Thayer (Moon Over Lake Elmo, 2001, etc.). And there's plenty of sex to be shocked by in little Kickapoo Falls, gateway to the beautiful but tourist-trashed Wisconsin Dells, where WWII sniper Pliny Pennington, deputy sheriff and a bit of a voyeur, patrols the back roads, catching couplers, dispensing justice and waiting for his much-admired boss Sheriff Fats Galatowich to retire. Deputy Pennington is Fats's heir presumptive, but that presumption is no longer a sure thing since the discovery of two nude corpses in the middle of a mysterious circle in an otherwise un-mysterious wheat field. The bodies of the late Michael and Maggie Butler have been symbolically mutilated: she's missing her famously beautiful face, and he's missing his reproductive system, both blown away by somebody's shotgun. The Deputy finds it difficult to distance himself professionally. He has been in love with Maggie since high school, and as someone whose own reproductive system took a hit in the war, there's a connection with Michael, too. Pennington's investigation immediately lands him in hot water with creepy Webster Sprague, a Nixon backer and congressional candidate who, with his rich wife Caren, has been whiling away those long Wisconsin winters making sex films with and of the Butlers. When Sprague's advice to Pennington to stop poking into things and start accepting Sheriff Fats's ridiculous murder/suicide theory goes unheeded, the deputy, one of maybe six Democrats in the county, sees that job promotion start to disappear and finds himself the new center of suspicion. Before things are sorted out, the Tricky Dick will make an appearance in nearby Madison, the sniper will be sniped at, and Pennington, searching for that missing Mrs. Sprague, will make a visit to his family's ancestral home, Nantucket, passing Hyannis on election night and getting a taste of deadly politics.