Book World: Thrillers that will have you on the edge of your seat

If, after the election, you aren’t completely exhausted by the very idea of suspense, try any of these fi ve late- in- the- year top- notch mysteries and thrillers, which are a welcome reminder that suspense can be fun. - - - “The Art of Violence,” by S. J. Rozan

In S. J. Rozan’s award- winning PI series, Lydia Chin is the intermittently dutiful Chinese American daughter. Bill Smith, her partner in business and life, smokes heavily and sleeps late. They are once again an unlikely perfect pair in this intricate puzzler about Sam Tabor, an addled Brooklyn outsider artist who hires Smith, surprisingly, to prove he’s a serial killer. Both PIs doubt unstable Tabor’s guilt, and as they explore his case, they mix it up with some of the more ice- in- their- veins denizens of the New York art scene. It all comes to a head in a big fi nish that reads like something engineered by the Flying Wallendas. ( Available Dec. 1) - - - “The Lady Upstairs,” by Halley Sutton

Los Angeles has never been more unalluring than in this bleak, racy and hard- to- put- down piece of neonoir by first- time novelist Halley Sutton, who’s a kind of # MeToo Jim Thompson. Antiheroine Jo works for a “staffi ng agency” that’s actually a “honeypot brothel” specializing in extorting large sums from its clients, “Hollywood’s richest scumbags.” When a sting goes all wrong and corpses pile up, Jo, already in debt to the shadowy “lady upstairs” who’s her boss, aims for a big fi nal payoff involving dirty cops and a slithery mayoral candidate. She even allows herself a modicum of “hope. That thing for suckers.” - - - “The Law of Innocence,” by Michael Connelly

In the sixth Mickey Haller Lincoln Lawyer courtroom thriller, the Los Angeles defense attorney who operates out of a Lincoln Town Car ( his business cards once read “Reasonable Doubt for a Reasonable Fee”) is himself charged with the murder of a onetime client, a sociopathic con man known as “The Most Hated Man in America.” Haller’s pretrial time in the lockup is a horror: a merciless beating, endless bologna sandwiches, “prison rash,” Fox News on the TV. “Bleeding the beast,” a scam involving government biofuel subsidies, must be exposed to exonerate Haller, and he’s aided by fi rst ex- wife Maggie “McFierce” McPherson and by half brother Harry Bosch, Connelly’s other mainstay in some of our era’s fi nest crime fi ction. - - - “A Spy in the Struggle,” by Aya de Leon

The author of the four Justice Hustlers novels - mysteries with a heightened leftist social awareness - has produced a passionately felt stand- alone with an aff ecting personal story at its center. Yolanda Vance was the token Black person at her all- girl prep school and had always felt she was “from everywhere and nowhere.” As a young lawyer working undercover for the FBI in a San Francisco Bay area “extremist” group that’s fi ghting a ruthless corporate spreader of toxins, Vance fi nds a satisfying connection to some gutsy neighborhood kids and in an aff air with a good man who also happens to be - it’s a problem - an FBI “subject.” ( Available Dec. 29) - - - “V2,” by Robert Harris British ex- journalist Robert Harris’ fl uent and deeply researched historical novels have taken readers from ancient Rome to the mid- 20th century. “V2,” set during fi ve tense days in November 1944, and then at war’s end, isn’t just a knockout thriller; it’s a primer on the history of modern rocketry. Kay Caton- Walsh is part of a team of slide- rule- equipped Women’s Auxiliary Air Force offi cers dispatched to Belgium to track deadly German V2 rockets so that RAF Spitfi res can attack the launch sites. Rudi Graf is a German engineer slowly growing a conscience. The real Werner von Braun shows up, too, playing Nazi generals “as skillfully as he played his cello,” a knack the rocketry pioneer nimbly redeploys at the end of the novel.