Death of a Cadet.

With historical mysteries so thick on the ground, doesn't it sometimes feel like a horse race? (''Going into the backstretch, the Victorians are holding the lead, but the Medievalists are gaining, and heeeere comes the Age of Enlightenment!'') Maybe that's why Frank Tallis has surged to the front of the field riding his dark horse, Vienna in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Opening in the Hapsburg capital at the height of the social season, FATAL LIES (Random House, paper, $15) immediately transports us back to the sophisticated world Tallis captured in ''A Death in Vienna'' and ''Vienna Blood.'' Dr. Max Liebermann (whose psychoanalytic methods give this series its peculiar fascination) and his friend Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt are both at the Detectives' Ball when Rheinhardt is called away to investigate the death of a cadet at St. Florian's military academy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]