Private Eye writer Andy Straka excells at pulling his plotlines straight out of the headlines, as he shows again with “Cold Quarry,” his latest entry in the fine Frank Pavlicek series. Basing a novel on terrorism these days is risky. If the plotline is too close to real events it’ll be decried as cheap sensationalism, and it’s no longer fashionable to devise wildly unrealistic terrorist stroylines as it was before September 11th. Straka strikes just the right balance, combining a gritty, realistic scenerio that’s just far enough away from actual events to keep it comfortable.

Straka’s hero is a hard-boiled P.I. of the old school who nevertheless has his tender moments. He hails from Charlottesville, Virginia (home of the University of Virginia), but this time out Straka effectively takes Pavlicek to the wilds of West Virginia to do battle with an assortment of white supremacists, lowlifes and shadowy government types. He’s joined again by his sometime sidekick and former homicide partner, Jake Toronto, whose backstory gets some examination this time out.

I won’t give away too much of the plot other than to say the book starts out with the murder of a friend of Pavlicek and Toronto who is a fellow enthusiast for the sport of falconry. The official police line is that the death was a hunting accident, but when Pavlicek is brutally attacked while visiting the crime scene, he immediately suspects foul play. When he starts asking questions, other people start to die and it becomes apparent that his friend Toronto is mixed up in something very dangerous.

Overall, “Cold Quarry” contains plenty of action as well as colorful and sympathetic characters and firmly establishes the Frank Pavlicek series as one of the best P.I. series to come along in recent years.