Kidnapping, serial killers and more

A romp through the Sunshine State, a twisted British thriller, a tale about embattled black policemen in 1940s Atlanta, and a kidnapping in suburbia: Mystery novelist Charles Finch reports on four suspenseful new reads.

DARKTOWN By Thomas Mullen 37 Ink/ Atria, 371 pp.

Thomas Mullen’s absorbing new mystery, reminiscent of E. L. Doctorow in a genre mood, is about the first black police officers hired by the city of Atlanta in 1948. They’re met with equal hostility inside and outside of the department, have limited powers, lower pay and an ambiguous set of duties, and know they’ll have failed if they’re merely as good as their white counterparts. Easy, right? Two of them, Smith and Boggs, break off from their customary peacekeeping duties to pursue the truth behind the murder of an anonymous black woman, her death ignored by white colleagues. Occasionally Darktown ( eeeg out of four) can seem conscious of its own worthiness, but Mullen is a skillful writer, his tale a wrenching re- creation of a time whose inexcusable racial imbalances have survived all too visibly into our own America.

RAZOR GIRL By Carl Hiaasen Knopf, 333 pp.

For sheer joyful fertility of invention, the American writer closest to Charles Dickens might be Carl Hiaasen, Florida’s resident master of the sunburnt caper. Neither can help himself. Running through a boring police log specifically to show that it’s boring, Hiaasen nevertheless pauses to note of a domestic dispute, “the husband was struck with a bag of frozen snapper chum,” a throwaway line better than anything in Inherent Vice. The rest of the Hiaasen experience — clueless tourists, strong daiquiris, satisfying endings — runs closer to Jimmy Buffett, and this new novel ( eeeg), about various criminals and shysters trying to con each other in Key West, grows repetitive in parts. But it also features a hilarious satire of Duck Dynasty ( just how down- home are those Robertsons?) and an ingenious redheaded heroine, on the spot to pluck up Hiaasen’s usual temporarily demoralized Everyman. As for the voice — it hasn’t been this giddily dazzling since 2004’ s Skinny Dip, another loose- limbed gem.

DAISY IN CHAINS By Sharon Bolton Minotaur, 352 pp.

The smartest novels about serial killers often seem to ask, subtly: Why are you reading this book? What is the fascination? Daisy in Chains ( eeeg) is in part about the most extreme form of that fascination, the seemingly ordinary women who send love letters and money to — sometimes even marry — killers guilty of impossibly evil acts. Cunningly constructed from e- mails, letters, articles and bursts of narration, it’s the story of a charismatic British doctor in prison for murdering overweight women. Insisting on his innocence, he enlists the help of Maggie Rose, an icily skeptical true- crime author. Soon enough her reserve is melting. Bolton’s final twists teeter on the edge of plausibility, but they stay just about upright in the end, and this intelligent, eerie, compulsively readable book will enthrall fans who want to know why we look into the dark instead of away from it.

THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR By Shari Lapena Pamela Dorman Books/ Viking, 307 pp.

Modern parenting can sometimes look as if it’s about achieving perfection, and Lapena’s fun, flimsy thriller involves the nightmare scenario in which cutting a single corner leads to tragedy. Anne and Marco’s babysitter cancels, but they decide to go next door for dinner anyway, trusting in the range of their monitor. The baby vanishes. A fairly standard psychological whodunit follows: Anne has had dissociative episodes, Marco may be in financial trouble, the neighbors have secrets. The Couple Next Door ( eegE) doesn’t approach the emotional gravity of the books by Paula Hawkins and Liane Moriarty it hopes you’ll compare it to. Its characters make the average episode of NCIS: New Orleans seem like a probing Chekhovian voyage into the depths of the human soul — and its biggest reveal arrives too early. But where did that baby go! It’s hard not to read to the end to find out, and the twists waiting there are gratifyingly clever.