CREATURES OF HABIT

The King Of Methlehem By Mark Lindquist. 235 pp. Simon & Schuster. $23.

Leaving Dirty Jersey: A Crystal Meth Memoir. By James Salant. 342 pp.
Simon Spotlight Entertainment/Simon & Schuster. $21.

Whether on the local news or the latest episode of "CSI," meth is the
drug of the moment. Last summer's big-budget "Miami Vice" visited a
meth-addled trailer park as well as the high seas of the sexier
cocaine trade, and November brought the country's first National
Methamphetamine Awareness Day.

The methamphetamine cook has laid claim to a permanent place in
criminal lore -- the cross-pollination of the killer next door and
the garage-based entrepreneur makes him a peculiarly American
character. The novelist and drug-crime prosecutor Mark Lindquist
introduces us to a chef among cooks in his uneven novel "The King of
Methlehem." Of his 13 aliases, Howard Schultz is the one to which
Lindquist's kingpin is most attached, perhaps because he wishes he
could move meth on the same scale that the chairman of Starbucks can
push caffeine.

Howard's operation is like a grotesque criminal carnival, from his
password-stealing A.T.M. to his staff of garbage-combing identity
thieves. Like Howard, Lindquist is best sifting through the grit and
the gear of the home labs, with the blenders and pancake griddles,
drain opener and coffee filters, rock salt and lithium batteries used
to elevate garden-variety cold tablets into the powerful, addictive
stimulant. For all of the knowledge on display, however, the book
could benefit from a little more nuance.

"We've cried wolf too many times -- about pot and heroin, for example
- -- and now people are understandably slow to accept that we really do
have a drug that's like putting your brain in a frying pan," the
novel's prosecutor, Mike Lawson, earnestly tells a television
reporter. For a real-life prosecutor like Lindquist, who deplores the
devastation it has visited upon many communities, the drug can begin
to rise beyond social problem to the level of evil scourge. But that
view can also make it awfully hard to create three-dimensional characters.

Lindquist needs to inhabit his junkies more, the way the noir master
Jim Thompson embraced even his most loathsome creations -- without
condoning their actions or trying to apologize for them. Instead
Lindquist seems determined to keep them unsympathetic. Lest Howard's
wild schemes and devious tricks win a few readers over, the author
makes him a pedophile as well.

The users in the book can't even spell one-syllable words correctly.
A hard-nosed detective named Wyatt James feels compelled to lecture
an addict that one quashes rather than squashes a warrant. Perhaps if
Wyatt weren't such a stickler for vocabulary it would have registered
that the criminal mastermind with whom he is said to be obsessed --
his "white whale," Howard -- has dropped in on Wyatt's on-and-off
girlfriend at the coffee shop where she works. In what feels like an
outright lapse, Wyatt not only doesn't rush her into protective
custody but barely notices when she informs him of the meth-psycho's
visit, responding, "Hey, hey, relax, don't worry about it."

It might help Lindquist temper his view of the criminals he
prosecutes if he read the new memoir by James Salant, "Leaving Dirty
Jersey." Salant came from a good home in Princeton with loving
parents but ended up a drug user and dealer. In one of the worst (but
perhaps most common) unintended consequences of rehab, his stint at a
facility in California called Get Straight for Life introduces him to
harder-core users who get him hooked on meth.

He testifies to the drug's overwhelming strength. Salant had been
using heroin, cocaine and LSD before he went to rehab, but when a
former nurse injects him with meth for the first time, he writes, "it
felt even better than I'd expected, but at the same time the
intensity of it caught me by surprise -- like swimming in a rough
ocean, enjoying it, and then all of a sudden you get taken under,
crushed and tumbled, and you realize that you can't surface until it lets you."

Though the exact veracity of Salant's tale would be difficult to
determine (he explains in an author's note that the work "derives
primarily from my memory"), it at least has none of the macho
posturing of James Frey's "Million Little Pieces." Salant goes out of
his way to remind the reader that he is only posing as a tough guy
among violent, paranoid cons. He makes his mark by telling his tale
plainly and well; there's no self-aggrandizing.

While there is plenty of sex and violence, Salant shines in less
lurid moments, like his painful conversations with Megan, the
9-year-old daughter of a fellow junkie, and in small details, as
when, riding in a rental car with his visiting parents, he observes
that it has been months since he's "driven in a single car whose
check-engine light was off."

Salant's territory is the users and dealers, not the backyard cooks.
In fact, homemade meth is in sharp decline, thanks to stepped-up law
enforcement and legislation cutting off access to legal precursor
ingredients. Like big multinationals in other industries, enormous
labs in Mexico and Asia have picked up the slack. The demand, Salant
shows us, remains. Someone will fill the need.

Nicholas Kulish is Berlin bureau chief for The Times and the author
of "Last One In," a novel.