John Harvey, one of the lesser-known masters of British crime fiction, continues to expand the scope of his police procedurals.

"Far Cry" focuses on ordinary families, their passions and problems, their strengths and weaknesses, which are revealed in their responses to the dangers, disappearances or deaths that face them.

The novel flashes back and forth in time with its primary focus on the families of Ruth Pierce (later, Lawson) a well-educated lover of the arts and culture who divorced her first husband, Simon, after their young daughter, Heather, died in an apparently accidental fall while on vacation with her friend, Kelly.

Ruth eventually remarries, has another daughter, Beatrice, who, at about the same age as Heather, disappears near her home in Cambridge.

There are, of course, other families. Kelly's working-class family, the Effords, is never the same after Heather's death, even though Kelly was rescued by an eccentric hermit.

Another case in Cambridge, a gruesome murder suicide of a married couple, traumatizes their young son who discovers the bodies.

The investigating officers in these cases have lives as complicated as the families of the victims.

In Cambridge, Detective Inspector Will Grayson and his assistant, Detective Sgt. Helen Walker of the Major Investigation Team, have worked well together for five years.

While he is happily married, his relationship with Walker, a tough, worldly and independent character, is complicated by her attraction to him and her desire to rise in the ranks.

When Grayson sends her to search for a possible connection between Beatrice's disappearance and Heather's death, she hooks up (in more ways than one) with Trevor Cordon, the detective inspector in charge of Heather's case.

Cordon is a jazz lover, and one of his favorite recordings, "Far Cry," a post-bop discordant piece by Eric Dolphy and Booker Little, hints at the messiness of the lives Mr. Harvey depicts.

The investigations of these three detectives allows Mr. Harvey to explore the complex web of social and psychological factors that shape the often surprising yet understandable behavior of his richly developed characters -- criminals, victims and investigators alike.

This is a story about collateral damage. The disappearances and deaths of these girls are vortices that draw more and more people in, changing their lives and fates even years after the events. In Mr. Harvey's world men and women shape their lives by denials. Personal circumstances and needs distort the memories and perceptions of everyone involved.

Most people in Mr. Harvey's world, no matter their origins and circumstances, cannot bear to look clearly at themselves and others, and so they suffer, and cause others to suffer, the consequences of their blindness.

Mr. Harvey does not abandon the whodunit element of the mystery.

The revelations are as unexpected as Mr. Dolphy's experimental riffs, but, along the way it is his variations on the theme of family that yield beauty and insight from these discordant lives.

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