Looking to escape? Here are some page-turners to review

Some of us who have time on our hands these days are dutifully catching up with literary masterpieces we’ve neglected until now — books that I think of collectively as “War and Mobymarch.” That’s admirable. But if, like me, you have an itch for vicarious adventure delivered by fiction that is both realistic (no swords, sorcery or time travel) and a cut above the tried and trashy, I say go ahead and scratch it.

The following handful of engrossing novels should be able to take your mind off social distancing, quotas on paper products, the economic downturn and worse.

Herman Wouk’s “The Caine

Mutiny” was a 1951 bestseller that transferred well to stage and screen. The novel makes no bones about its debts to Melville’s “Billy Budd” and Conrad’s “Lord Jim,” each of which is mentioned by one of Wouk’s characters. That honesty is refreshing, as is the author’s variation on the theme of shipboard tyranny (the Caine is a U.S. minesweeper plying the Pacific during World War II). My only qualm is that the dictatorial villain, Captain Queeg, may foil your escape by reminding you of an actual present-day American boogeyman with a five-letter surname. Yet the tale is so well-told that the risk is worth taking.

Anne Perry’s “A Breach of

Promise” (1998) belongs to one of her two mystery series set in Victorian England. It features private eye William Monk, an amnesiac whose memory is in tatters but whose crime-solving skills have remained intact. As the title suggests, the plot centers on a lawsuit over a broken promise of marriage, a complaint that