Tim Willocks's first book, Green River Rising , earned the kind of reviews that are rarely accorded to most so-called literary thrillers. This remarkable debut was hailed for its rich, powerful writing as well as its dramatic, page-turning suspense. The New York Times Book Review called it "beautifully vivid" and "triumphantly realized," while People called it "as fine a thriller as one could ask for."          The author's much-anticipated second novel is as powerful and ambitious as its predecessor. Set in New Orleans and the rural South, it is the story of a chain of cataclysmic events let loose by the murder of Clarence Jefferson, a legendary lawman who has gathered a cache of evidence that could imprison corrupt politicians in five states. His last act, it appears, was to hand-pick two people as the unlucky heirs of his potentially explosive evidence files. The pair must either dispose of them as fast as they can or--at considerable risk to themselves--deliver the files to the authorities. Lenna Parillaud and Dr. Cicero Grimes, Jefferson's "beneficiaries," have never met. Lenna, a millionaire businesswoman, has been racked by grief and rage over the loss of her daughter. Dr. Grimes is a clinically depressed psychiatrist. Though both have burdens enough of their own, they are swept up into this story of southern violence, passion, and vengeance, the likes of which perhaps only the readers of Willocks's previous novel can imagine.          Compared by critics to Norman Mailer, James Ellroy, Stephen Hunter, and Andrew Vachss, Willocks offers a unique amalgam of gritty realism and something more--a depth and intensity that is seldom achieved in popular fiction. Tim Willocks is a British doctor and psychiatrist who runs a drug detox clinic in London and writes literate thrillers and screenplays in his spare time. He also loves colorful American locales: his Green River Rising took place inside a Texas prison, and Bloodstained Kings stretches across a gaudy Southern landscape from New Orleans to rural Georgia. When a corrupt cop dies, a demented woman who keeps her husband locked in a cage and a doctor haunted by guilty secrets are among those who rush to search the dead man's files for information that could destroy them. Readers who enjoy the absolute blackness of James Ellroy 's books should feel right at home with Willocks. You'll find many of the essentials of the Southern Gothic novel here: a lavish but strangely lifeless plantation house; a family member locked away in a secret hiding place; a devoted servant privy to dark family secrets; a corrupt and corrupting lawman; a hothouse atmosphere of decadence, venality and treachery; and murder, revenge, miscegenation, torture, and child abduction. And, as with any good Southern Gothic, you'll find that this is also a morality play in which the forces of good, however ragged, suspiciously motivated, and unlikely heroic, confront the forces of evil, both personal and institutional. Two letters from a supposed dead man, one to his killer and one to his millionaire mistress, trigger a violent quest that sweeps the reader along in its breakneck pace. A tour de force from the author of Green River Rising (LJ 9/1/94). -?Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. As in his first novel, Green River Rising (1994), British psychologist Willocks blends philosophy with brutality and violence to produce a thriller that is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. Six months after he disappears and is presumed dead, massive New Orleans police captain Clarence Jefferson, who assumes mythic proportions in the novel, is still the puppet master pulling the strings. The posthumous revelation of his legacy--suitcases full of documentation proving the corruption of powerful people--leads to a chase involving wealthy, powerful Lenna Parillaud, Jefferson's former lover, who keeps her murderous husband caged like an animal; Dr. Cicero Grimes, whose inner core Jefferson admires; Grimes' father, whose steely integrity pulls him into the fray; Ella MacDaniels, a young woman ignorant of her parentage who is at the heart of the story; and assorted men of baser motives. Between discussions of fate, the nature of humanity, and the hereafter, the body count mounts and horrifying local history is revealed. Riveting, sometimes stomach-turning action in a literary guise; very strong stuff. Michele Leber More flashy guts and gore, southern style, from shrink- turned-novelist-and-screenwriter Willocks, whose debut thriller, Green River Rising (1994), garnered high praise. An embattled doctor-hero again serves as the main catalyst to action. Here, it's Cicero Grimes, awakened from a weeks-long funk in his rubbish-strewn New Orleans firehouse-home by a lawyer with a letter, naming Grimes as the beneficiary of the man he himself had stabbed and left for dead in a burning house. The man, Clarence Jefferson, a mountai