It’s Halloween night, and the K-Bar in Bolton, Montana, is well into its annual costume party. The bar is full of Elvis impersonators competing for top dress-up honors. Drinking with her friends among other costumed partygoers and over-imbibers is local college student Grace Adams, dressed up as a prom queen. She gets spooked enough by someone she has tagged as a stalker that she leaves the party to escape the real or imagined threat.

At the same time as hips are swiveling in the K-Bar, the nearby home of well-known local residents Peter and Hannah Granger is burning to the ground, leaving the remains of two unidentified bodies in the rubble as well as a heap of smoldering questions.

Enter Detective Macy Greeley, who arrives from neighboring Helena to investigate the fire and determine whether it was accident or arson. That it was an intentional act soon becomes clear, and Macy sets out to dissect the lives and relationships of the Grangers—Hannah, an artist and teacher at the local college, and Peter, a nationally popular author who teaches a popular writing workshop.

Macy must determine the identity of one of the bodies and unearth a motive behind the murder of Peter Granger, the second victim. As more becomes known about the coterie of female students who seemed to be Granger groupies, readers may begin to share Macy’s suspicions that a lot more than manuscript critique was going on in Peter Granger’s creative writing workshop. It turns out Grace was once very close to the Grangers—taking painting classes from Hannah and a spot in Peter's coveted workshop—until they had a mysterious falling out.

The detective casts a wide net to include the volatile, often troubled young women who formed the members of the writing workshop; Jessica, a despondent art department associate with mixed motives: the Grangers’ personal assistant, Cornelia; a disaffected boyfriend or two; and the malignant stalker, Jordan.

Karin Salvalaggio’s Silent Rain builds on themes in her earlier Bone Dust White (2014). Those who haven’t read the first book may find that Silent Rain involves some heavy sledding. Both Grace and Macy were front and center there, and that past influences the present in the new entry. Unfortunately it’s often referred to with roundabout, sometimes muddy allusions. The goal may be to preserve the suspense in Silent Rain, but the result for the reader is often confusion. This book is all arms and legs—presenting too many questions that dangle without resolution. This can obscure the author’s very real talent for intriguing police procedurals, a solid core that will hopefully emerge more strongly in future novels.

If you are a fan of NBC’s “Law & Order” programs, you’ll probably be a fan of Peter Blauner’s new novel, Proving Ground. A staffer in the writer’s room, as well as a past Edgar Award-winning author, Blauner knows how to write compelling crime fiction. But, what’s more important, he knows how to portray the characters caught up in the midst of criminal misdeeds, bringing out their emotional and inner turmoil in gripping fashion.

Former Army lieutenant Nathaniel “Natty Dread” Dresden, already haunted by the death of a young Iraqi boy at his hands, is further traumatized when his father, civil rights lawyer David Dresden, is killed in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. While processing this latest disruption in his life, longtime family friend and David’s business partner, Benjamin Grimaldi, aka Ben Grimm, enlists Natty’s help in closing David’s latest high-profile case involving an Iraqi man suing the United States government for its role in torturing him about alleged terrorist activity.

The deeper Natty digs into the case—even while butting heads with the FBI and NYPD Detective Lourdes Robles, who each have their own investigations—the more secrets he uncovers about his father and Ben Grimm, putting family and friendship to the ultimate test.

Blauner easily gets into the head of each of his characters, creating a sense of sympathy and compassion for their individual traumas. But this is easily Natty’s tale, overall, and the majority of the book rightly follows his investigation and personal quest for redemption. Blauner writes crisp, detailed passages and sharp dialogue, giving the story an edgy, almost noirish quality. There’s even a fiery court scene between attorneys that would fit into almost any “Law & Order” episode.

If you haven’t read any books in Donna Leon’s stunning detective series featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, now up to 26 books, the first installment may take a bit of getting used to as everything takes place on the water. Of course it does—her detective lives in Venice, where you pop out your door and into a boat in order to get to your destination.

In Earthly Remains, the scene shifts from Venice to its nearby islands, resulting in a subtle change in pace and atmosphere in this outstanding new entry in the series.

Brunetti’s blood pressure has run a bit awry, and he ends up embarking on a trip to regroup and relax. With his wife, Paola, in agreement with the plan, Brunetti is off to stay by himself in a villa that’s owned by a wealthy relative just a short boat trip away on the nearby island of Sant’Erasmo, in the Venetian Lagoon.

Earthly Remains takes shape as Brunetti begins his somewhat solitary stay at the unoccupied villa by making the acquaintance of the villa’s caretaker, widower Davide Casati. The two begin rowing daily together in the quiet waters of the lagoon among the shimmering reaches of nature, water and sun, burning Brunetti’s mind to quiet. He grows to love the nature that surrounds him as they row: “Brunetti had the sudden realization that, though none of this belonged to him, he belonged to all of it.”

Leon paints a picture of the incessant, encompassing warmth and the quiet reaches of nature as the two men travel out among the reeds and skimming ducks under the burnishing sun. Casati introduces his friend to the bees he keeps on a number of outlying islands where, in many of the hives, the bees are dying—to Casati’s grave distress.

The sun-blanched idyll changes in an instant when Brunetti, walking to the dock in the early morning to meet his friend, finds that both Casati and his boat are missing. Brunetti must slip back into character as a law enforcement officer as he joins in the search for the caretaker. As facts emerge, the detective is forced to re-evaluate all that he knows about the caretaker and his troubled past.

Stunning descriptions of the often tranquil surroundings mingle with an atmosphere that quickly turns malignant as troubling discoveries begin to emerge and take shape beneath the surface of the calm waters.

“I didn’t do the crime.” Journalist Rebekah Roberts reads these words, part of prisoner DeShawn Perkins’ handwritten plea for justice. He’s doing time for a murder that took place 22 years earlier, when Malcolm and Sabrina Davis, along with their young foster daughter, were brutally shot in their Crown Heights apartment. DeShawn, their troubled foster son, is fingered for the crime. But after reading DeShawn’s letter, Rebekah is moved to follow up on his contention of innocence.

Conviction is the latest mystery from Julia Dahl (Invisible City, Run You Down). Police officer Saul Katz, a prominent character in Dahl's earlier books, is a kind of stepfather to Rebekah. The story slips back and forth in time between 2014, the year Rebekah reads DeShawn's letter, to 1992. We learn that 1992 was the year of the murder, and that Katz was involved in the DeShawn case as a rookie with the NYPD during this time when violence between black and Jewish neighborhoods was rampant in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.

The elements of this chilling, well-crafted jigsaw puzzle never skip over the hard facts of racial division and frequent bloodshed that racked the Brooklyn community during the '90s. Each character receives close attention: from Isaiah, an uncompromising Jewish landlord; to Henrietta, whose testimony solidified the case; to Joseph's unspoken, terrible mission; and finally to DeShawn and his tragic story. Most of all, Conviction captures the characters of Saul and Rebekah in their intricate, sometimes explosive interactions that explore both affection and wariness.

One particular passage captures Dahl’s essential mindset as she frames this story. In Saul's early cop years, while closely involved with the Crown Heights neighborhood, he recognizes “how much the camaraderie among officers resembled the camaraderie among the men in shul. . . . The men in blue uniforms—like the men in black hats—had a common language, a common purpose, a common set of rules and prejudices. They were misunderstood by outsiders, but outsiders were not important. What was important was the man beside you.”

Rebekah shines in this installment in Dahl's series, and the young journalist is sure to linger in readers’ minds. She’s solid, believable and never overplayed. In Conviction, Rebekah recognizes the insular nature of parties in conflict and finds a way to bring the truth to light.

In Eliot Pattison’s masterful and deeply moving new mystery, Skeleton God, a disgraced former inspector must grapple with the horrors of Tibet’s past to uncover a crime decades in the making.

Shan Tao Yun is a former Beijing inspector banished to Yangkar, a remote town in the mountains of Tibet, where fragments of a shattered culture haunt the people left to eke out a living under the gaze of Communist China. But the village’s fragile peace is destroyed when three corpses are discovered in a remote tomb. One of the bodies is a long dead Buddhist saint, but flanking him are a Red Army soldier killed 50 years ago and an American killed only hours before the tomb was discovered.

The story frequently pauses as Shan considers the ramifications of his investigation on himself and his loved ones. He tries to soothe himself by meditating on the stark, unspoiled beauty of the Tibetan mountains or stealing a few moments with his friends. These flashes of peace, written with skillful restraint by Pattison, make Skeleton God a much more contemplative read than its macabre premise would imply.

Every advance in the case rings slightly hollow due to Shan’s belief that he is damning the people of his village to increasing government control and surveillance, and that his own life and his son’s are also at stake. Pattison wrings mounting tension from Shan’s pursuit of the killers simply reminding the reader that at any moment, the characters’ freedom could be ripped away from them.

Skeleton God is a melancholy mystery, an elegy for a lost culture as well as a well-plotted puzzle that manages to be as clever as it is unexpectedly and deeply moving. There is a mystery to be solved of course, the solution of which leads to a tense and inventive final confrontation between Shan and the killers, but Pattison also draws a remarkable psychological portrait of a people living in a post-apocalyptic reality, trying to grasp small measures of resistance and hope from the wreckage.

At its outset, Mister Memory has the intimate yet informal detailing of an adult fable or fairy tale. This makes sense, given that its author, Marcus Sedgwick, has published a number of YA books that include fantasy, myths and graphic novels.

Mister Memory introduces readers to Marcel Després, a handsome, naïve and uncommon young man whose extraordinary mind lands him in big trouble. For Marcel, every tiny action and word—the details of every moment in his life—is indelibly recorded in his mind. He’s literally unable to forget. For a long time he’s unaware that he possesses this unique trait—or burden. He simply thinks everyone’s mind works that way.

Unable to hold down a job in Paris of 1899, Marcel finally becomes a popular cabaret hit as “Mister Memory,” a moniker that may evoke for some the Hitchcockian character in The 39 Steps, a 1939 film full of dark, comic moments.

Sedgwick’s narrative soon turns into a clever, absorbing mystery after Marcel is arrested for killing his wife upon discovering her in bed with a lover. Instead of doing a stint in jail—the usual Parisian punishment for murdering an unfaithful wife—Marcel is whisked away to a mental hospital for the criminally insane, and the case is summarily closed like the slamming of a door.

Inspector Petit of the Paris prefecture realizes there is more to the story, at a level that involves the highest realms of law enforcement as well as the lowest echelons of Parisian society. A photograph of Marcel’s wife, also a cabaret performer, sets Petit on a dangerous path to discovery and action.

Mister Memory is an extraordinary trip into the deep recesses of mind and memory, brought to light little by little as Marcel’s physician comes to learn more about his patient’s inner world. Dr. Morel tells him, “You have taught me something. Through you I have come to see that there is no such thing as truth. That all we ever really know is perception.”

Petit, who struggles with memories of his own that he’d like to banish, belatedly comes to realize that “each memory is itself only a construction of infinitely small moments of time, each of which has no meaning in itself. It is only the story we make by linking such moments together, and the narrative that creates, that gives us any meaning.”

It’s hot, hot, hot in Dallas, Texas, where a drug bust gone bad welcomes readers to police detective Betty Rhyzyk’s world of undercover narcotics, and into Kathleen Kent’s new crime novel, The Dime.

Kent, a writer of historical fiction, explodes onto the crime genre with a detective who has all the qualities that’ll make her stand out from the crowd. No shrinking violet, Betty is a very tall, redheaded lesbian, as well as a kick-butt detective, transplanted from Brooklyn to good ol’ boy Dallas, where lewd comments and not-so-subtle discrimination are the least of what she’s facing.

In her latest case, Betty confronts a slew of murder victims, but realizes that the gruesome deaths don’t have the marks of Mexico’s drug cartel. Betty and her team follow disparate clues to determine just who may be challenging the cartel—and who is responsible for the growing list of victims, including one of the detective team’s own.

Kent rises above the obligatory badass conventions that can sometimes derail brutal “cops and robbers” tales like these, with their complicated, often-violent protagonists. She excels in other ways, by creating an engrossing story of the sometimes-strained but always-changing relationships between this unusual detective and her more mainstream hetero colleagues, and puts into perspective a somewhat over-the-top torture-filled scene that threatens to unbalance the rest of the plot. Kent’s brilliant, sometimes-gentle and humorous observations humanize and set this book apart.

The Dime showcases the author’s strengths with multifaceted descriptions of Betty and her sturdy friendship with her police partner, Seth; the many characters on the police force; and her unfortunate run-ins with the disagreeable family of her lover/partner, Jackie. A religion-crazed cult leader who surfaces later in the book is a chilling, stay-in-your head character who may possibly figure in future books. Kent tops off her narrative with a couple of one-of-a-kind characters whose small heroisms figure very large: the marvelously rendered Civil War re-enactor who stands his ground; and James Earle Walden, Jackie’s alcoholic, Vietnam vet great-uncle.

Best of all, the voice of Betty’s deceased Uncle Benny, the man who inspired her life, threads through the book with an ongoing patter of whimsical advice, sometimes funny, sometimes dead serious, but always on the money.

On the surface, Tracee de Hahn’s debut mystery mimics those Golden Age country house crime novels where the suspects gather in the drawing room facing each other across the tea table, with the curtains drawn against the night. Her book, however, is somehow both more and less than those old thrillers. It’s set in present-day Switzerland as a storm of epic proportions sweeps through the Lausanne region, blanketing the area of Château Vallotton with deadly ice, snow and wind.

Swiss Vendetta opens on a thrilling note—an icy blast, with a murder taking place right off the bat, before readers (or the victim) have time to bundle up against the weather. Just before the storm shuts down all outside access, rookie police officer Agnes Lüthi slips and slides onto the scene along with a couple of other officers, to contend with a château full of suspects.

Though officers and suspects are effectively trapped on the scene by the ice and snow, this particular château has tons of rooms, stairways and secret tunnels, so it’s not exactly a modest Agatha Christie country house. Agnes and her colleagues spread out to try and learn why Felicity Cowell, a bright young appraiser for a London auction house employed by the family to appraise an estate full of treasures, has met her death out in the storm, dressed in a diamond-embellished gown. The château bristles with suspects from the Vallotton family—the regal Marquise, her nephews Julien and Daniel, a peckish godson named Mulholland and a Great Dane named Winston. A young American, Nick Graves, who’s doing historical research at the estate, has a prior connection to the victim, upping the intrigue level. The family’s elderly neighbor, Monsieur Arsov, also figures large, with his dramatic World War II backstory.

Everyone’s full of polite obfuscations, but they give Agnes the run of the estate to pursue her inquiries, so this old/new crime novel ought to be a page-turner, with its marvelous backdrop of storm and menace. However, detective Lüthi’s insights are not always substantiated within the narrative, sometimes seeming to appear from offstage. Readers may struggle to develop sympathy for the author’s sometimes two-dimensional characters, who never quite spring to life.

Swiss Vendetta is full of side stories rich with promise. After a great beginning, a slow-going middle gives way to a finale that helps rescue some of the book’s dramatic potential.