Crime fiction roundup “Shell Game” by Sara Paretsky, Morrow, 400 pages, $27.99

There has always been a streak of Joe Friday in V.I. “Vic” Warshawski. If some investigators drift away from the facts of a case, Sara Paretsky’s take-noguff P.I. keeps them front and center. But it’s the beating heart beneath Vic’s professionalism that drives her, especially when a family member or friend is threatened or victimized. In “Shell Game,” Vic’s niece Reno disappears after asking too many questions about a payday loan company she worked for. Then Reno’s sister Harmony, with whom she endured a brutal childhood, is targeted by thugs. In a parallel development, Felix, an immigration activist whose aunt is Vic’s close friend Lotty, is suspected of murdering an archaeology student whose body is found stuffed into the hollow bottom of a log. The victim appears to have been selling precious artifacts he acquired in Syria. Everyone, it seems, is hiding something. “Shell Game” could hardly be more timely with its pointed riffs on #MeToo, the brutality of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the long reach of Russian oligarchs. At the same time, the novel is rooted in classic noir. Unlike the passive Sgt. Friday, Vic suffers considerable physical abuse to get her man. At this point in her storied career, it’s no skin off her nose.

“The Witch Elm” by Tana French, Viking, 528 pages, $28

The witch elm in question in Tana French’s terrific stand-alone novel is in the garden of the Ivy House, an ancestral family home where art gallery public relations man Toby and his cousins Susanna and Leon spent considerable time together as teens a decade ago. After being savagely beaten by burglars in his Dublin apartment, Toby retreats to the Ivy House with his sweetheart of a girlfriend to recuperate and to look after his dying uncle. After a human skull turns up in the garden and police find more remains, a Pandora’s box of guilt, recrimination and horror flies open for the woozy, post-traumatic Toby. Though it’s determined that the victim was an old classmate of his, he struggles to remember anything from those days, including the murdered classmate’s campaign of abuse against each of his cousins. The way in which French turns the unreliable narrator ploy on its head is genius. And the scenes in which Toby is interrogated by the drolly insinuating police Detective Rafferty undercut the squalid events with humor. No fan of French’s great Dublin Murder Squad series will want her to be on leave from it for long, but if she keeps producing head-spinners like this, many of us will be up for making that sacrifice.

“November Road” by Lou Berney, Morrow, 320 pages, $26.99

In the gloomy aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Charlotte Roy impulsively leaves her home in Oklahoma and her bad marriage and heads for a new life with her two young daughters — maybe in Los Angeles, where they can stay with her aunt. After her car breaks down in New Mexico, a kind and attractive insurance agent whom she met at her motel offers to drive her to Las Vegas, where she can get a car from his dealer friend and continue on to California. Frank Guidry, we know, is actually a mob operative from New Orleans who paid off a mechanic to make her car “unrepairable” so he can use her and the kids as cover. He is on the run himself, having figured out the Eldorado he was told to get rid of in Dallas links a mob boss to an assassination. Frank is now scheduled for removal himself. To his surprise, he falls for Charlotte and the happy family life he could have with her, but once she starts to doubt his story, he risks losing her. You only wish that, as exciting as the highly touted “November Road” is, it didn’t settle for using the assassination as a plot device and looked deeper through the dark shadows it cast — and casts still.