The setting in some novels is as important as the characters or the plot. That's the case with two well-crafted murder mysteries.

One is set in what historian Kenneth Jackson calls "the crabgrass frontier," the suburbs of New York. The other takes place in a rougher, fading frontier: Wyoming. Both offer a vivid sense of place and characters shaped by where they live:

By C.J. Box
Putnam, 372 pp., $23.95

It's late September 2001, and as if the terrorist attacks haven't triggered enough anxiety, a woman's decapitated body washes ashore near the railroad station on "one of those powder-blue late September mornings when middle-aged commuters stand on platforms, watching airplanes pass before the sun and hoping the apex of some great arc in their lives hasn't already been reached."

The victim is the best friend of Lynn Schulman, a Riverside native who left 25 years ago and has moved back with her kids and lawyer husband, who has an ethically challenged boss on Wall Street. Lynn has quit her career as a newspaper photographer and worries that she has failed as a mother and a photojournalist.

The murder brings her in uneasy contact with her high school boyfriend, Michael Fallon, a bitter detective. He has problems at home and on the job. Fallon feels he unfairly lost the police chief's job to a lifelong friend because the friend is black and he's white in a town with racial tensions. And he may have had a relationship with the murder victim whose husband, like most husbands, is a suspect.

Blauner, a former reporter for New York magazine, captures the unavoidable daily connections of life in a small town. He's at his best on unrequited longings and simmering resentments fed by the town's blue-collar roots and newly arrived, if uncertain, affluence.

The page-turning plot, which builds to a violent climax, weaves in local lore. A key to solving the murder is the Hudson, which, as the locals know, isn't really a river but an estuary whose current flows north and south. The murderer, among others in Riverside, pays for what he doesn't know.
* C.J. Box's Winterkill is his third novel featuring Joe Pickett, a likable state game warden in Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains who works without backup despite a knack for encountering trouble.

Pickett, a decent father and husband, tries to do right when everyone else is perfecting the bureaucratic art of covering their behinds. As another character puts it, Pickett values being underestimated.

In the midst of a blizzard, he discovers a crazed hunter ignoring limits on the killing of elk. The shooter turns out to be a federal official in charge of closing roads and denying grazing and logging leases. This doesn't boost his popularity in the mountains.

By the end of the first chapter, someone has used him for target practice with a bow and arrow. His murder adds to the tensions between residents and federal bureaucrats, especially one ambitious woman who's in charge of a task force in search of a task.

Pickett is caught in between, as is his fragile foster daughter, whose loser of a mother suddenly returns to town with an all-star collection of survivalists. Not the TV-reality kind, but survivors of shootouts with the FBI in Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

Pickett tries to solve the murder and protect his daughter. Box, a former ranch hand and newspaper reporter, draws Pickett as a quiet Gary Cooper type, although when riled, he warns another character: "If you don't start telling me the truth, and I mean every bit of it, things are going to get real western real fast."

Which they do, mostly thanks to the clueless feds.

That's the only problem with the novel. Could even the worst bureaucrat be as paranoid and self-obsessed as Melinda Strickland, whose experience with wildlife is limited to her cocker spaniel? And what about the FBI agent who has learned one lesson: Start shooting before the press arrives and you lose your "tactical advantage"?

Box's advantage is how well he describes winter in Wyoming. Some books about food can whet your appetite. Winterkill will have you grabbing another blanket.

Setting steers 'Day,' 'Winterkill'
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY