“The Devil Raises His Own” (Soho Crime, 368 pp., $27.95) is his latest novel to feature the photographer Bill Ogden, who was first seen in “Cottonwood,” set on the Kansas frontier in 1872.

Now, more than four decades removed from his “Cottonwood” shenanigans, he’s living in Los Angeles, still able to work (and score), albeit more slowly. His granddaughter, Flavia, fresh off killing her husband back in Kansas (“I recently collapsed Albert’s cranial vault,” she says), has taken on partner/successor duties at his photography studio.

Both are pulled into the orbit of the “blue movie” industry — milder in 1916, to be sure, but still prone to violence — where they encounter a vivid, pungent cast of scoundrels and flimflam artists, from a film star named Magnolia Sweetspire to a mousy postal inspector named Melvin de Kamp.

Phillips always adopts a wonderfully deadpan air, but beneath his black humor is a steely emotional core. “The Devil Raises His Own” is a romp, but it’s also a poignant exploration of chosen families, broken homes and desperate dreams.

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Hollywood muck also figures prominently in Morgan Richter’s “The Divide” (Knopf, 292 pp., $28), a wild ride of a novel that never quite proceeds in the expected direction.

Jenny St. John has been haunting the fringes of the film industry ever since her supposed big break — the lead role in an indie film called “The Divide” — evaporated. There’s only so much money she can make grifting people as a psychic life coach.

Then Serge Grumet, who directed the film she hoped to star in, turns up dead, and his ex-wife, Genevieve, goes missing. Problem is, the cops think Jenny is Gena because they look remarkably similar. Shown a picture of Gena, Jenny “felt a shock of recognition you get coming across a photo of yourself you didn’t know existed.”

As she is pulled into the world of her doppelgänger, one populated with other strivers and schemers and — it would seem — a killer, Jenny understands their resemblance has a biological connection, if only she can figure out what it is.

Richter, an industry veteran and pop culture critic, writes with the energy of a freshly charged battery, full of bright sparks, quick wit and vivid color. Even if I didn’t buy every plot twist, I found Jenny devilishly fun company.

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The opening line of Snowden Wright’s “The Queen City Detective Agency” (Morrow, 270 pp., $30) sets the tone immediately: “On New Year’s Day of 1985, Turnip Coogan, facing 20 to life for capital murder, decided he’d have to be dumb as a post not to break out of jail, and his mama didn’t raise no post.”

Turnip, a low-level Dixie Mafia guy, turns up dead in due course, shortly before the town of Meridian, Mississippi — Queen City — is overrun with those who make crime their business, and those who want to.

After Coogan tumbles off a roof, his mother hires Clementine Baldwin, the proprietor of the Queen City Detective Agency, to find his killer. Clementine is capable and confident, her skin thickened by too many instances of casual racism, but as the case moves in unexpected and upsetting directions, she discovers the cost of unearthing Queen City’s skeletons from their hiding places.

Wright writes sentences that beg to be quoted. He clearly has studied the pacing and syntax of hard-boiled fiction. And yet, enjoyable as this book was, I wanted it to be more in tune with itself rather than the rhythms of an entire genre.

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Finally, Jamie Harrison’s mysteries featuring Jules Clement, published between 1995 and 2000, were recommended to me in my bookseller days over 20 years ago, but it took their reissue — and the publication of a fifth, “The River View” (334 pp., Counterpoint, $28) — to read them all in a frenzied gulp.

Over the course of the series, Jules transforms from an East Coast doctoral student and archaeologist into the sheriff of Blue Deer, Montana — the post once held by his father, who was murdered when Jules was a teenager. “Maybe Jules chose archaeology because it was the perfect profession for facing the enormity and the inevitability of death,” Harrison writes, “but in the matter of his father’s death, he wanted nothing of the past.”

As the new book opens in 1997, Jules, married and with a young child, has resigned from the sheriff’s office and is working as a PI. He’s also dabbling in archaeology, plumbing the mysteries of old bones — even his father’s — as he tries to make peace with Blue Deer and forge a new path.

I can’t help wondering what he’s doing in 2024, and I hope Harrison catches readers up to the present soon.

Alex Berenson, a business reporter for The New York Times who reported on the war in Iraq in 2003, may have been told he was taking a serious literary risk by using the after-effects of Sept. 11 for his debut thriller. But if so, it’s to our benefit that he’s ignored those phantom critics and concentrated on building suspense, maintaining thrills and plotting a frighteningly plausible scenario. Save for a few rough patches in believability and pacing, this is a worthwhile first effort.

When John Wells is sent by the CIA to infiltrate an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan, he knows he will have to immerse himself completely in their fundamentalist doctrine to be successful. But when he loses contact with his employers — particularly his handler and unresolved love interest, Jennifer Exley — and keeps silent even after Sept. 11, they assume that success has morphed into treachery, if he hasn’t been killed by the terrorists on whom he was supposed to inform. But any assumptions the agency has made are tossed aside several years later when Wells turns up on American soil — ostensibly to carry out the orders of Omar Khadri, whose agenda consists of topping the carnage level of the World Trade Center.

And so the terror begins. Hundreds are killed in a double bombing attack in Los Angeles. A doctoral student in microbiology conducts secret experiments in his downtown Montreal basement lab. As the death toll mounts from Peshawar to Atlanta and from Langley to New York, the chase is on to bring Wells in and find out where his loyalties lie, even as he does his best to stay focused on the real task at hand: making sure Khadri doesn’t carry out his plans for American devastation.

“The Faithful Spy” brims with knowledge, especially about the frightening tactics used in the name of war. But where the author shines most is in showing how a decade of isolation has affected Wells so much that he’s alienated from his family and future, and that fighting in a war that’s difficult to win may be for the greater good — but can be a personal disaster.

“The Faithful Spy” seeks to enlighten using the trappings of entertainment, combining thinking with thrills. And on that front, it succeeds quite well. *

Scott Turow’s new novel (his first since 2002’s “Reversible Errors”) wears the outward trappings of a spirited wartime tale — and does so quite well — but he’s more interested in the lies people tell to spare their loved ones pain, and the secrets they keep in order to survive another day. Material like this should have made for a standout effort, but the result ends up curiously unfulfilling. Paradoxically, the fault may lie in the way Turow constructed this particular story — one he says he has longed to tell for several decades.

“Ordinary Heroes” opens with death, and its lingering aftermath. Retired Chicago-area journalist Stewart Dubinsky is arranging the funeral of his father, David Dubin, when he discovers a packet of letters dating from World War II. The shocks come one by one: a former fiancee, a court-martial, a brief imprisonment. Who was this David Dubin, and why did he never speak of his past?

Though Stewart’s mother, a Holocaust survivor, blocks her son’s questions whenever possible, years of training and a compulsive personality serve Stewart well in his quest to discover his hidden family history. His search leads him to a Connecticut nursing home to speak with Barrington Leach, David’s former lawyer and unexpected keeper of a novel-length series of accounts David wrote of his court-martial. After reading David’s account of the events leading to his incarceration, Stewart realizes his father was made of far more passionate material than his role of loving husband and distant father suggested. The letters paint David as more a flesh-and-blood character than Stewart knew in life and spur him to dig into troubling mysteries that haunted his father for more than 60 years — at the potential cost of Stewart’s memories and his family’s wishes.

“Ordinary Heroes” aims for great heights, but Turow errs in allotting the bulk of the novel to David’s narrative. What should have been a poignant, vivid retelling of doomed love, buried secrets and raw emotion is instead overly coincidental and oddly flat. David’s drifting away from his fiancee, Grace, is supposed to resonate but feels matter-of-fact. His quest to find and capture Robert Martin, an OSS officer whose loyalties seem mysterious, deflates because they meet again and again before the final, almost anticlimactic, revelation. What saves these sections from complete banality is Gita Lodz, a Polish resistance fighter (and the object of David’s obsession). She’s no Mata Hari or flailing damsel, but something more ambiguous and thus more believable.

Stewart only appears in short narrative chunks but is the more nuanced, more morally questioning, protagonist. Unfortunately, he’s not given enough opportunity to show how his discovery of David’s earlier life affects him and others. His children make a throwaway remark that “he’s on crack,” and his wife of 30 years leaves him, but the emotional fallout is virtually ignored because it’s told to the reader, not shown. Perhaps there simply wasn’t enough pain and depth to divide equally between protagonists.

“Ordinary Heroes” is by no means a failure: It can’t be with a writer as talented as Turow. But sometimes distance affords a greater emotional impact than immediacy, and this story might have worked more effectively with complete hindsight. *

Ask any crime fiction aficionado for a list of the genre’s best writers and chances are high that Ruth Rendell’s name will appear near the top. The London-based psychological suspense author has been writing steadily for 40 years, beginning with 1964’s “A Doon with Death.” The number of awards to her name would fill an entire living room and a large part of the next room over.

I’d go on, but you get my drift: Rendell’s considered to be one of the genre’s greats, someone whose influence will be felt many years after her passing.

“The Rottweiler” certainly demonstrates why such accolades are deserved. Rendell’s prose is incisive and clear, peeling away the complex layers that her characters, no matter how ordinary they appear, actually possess. Everybody has something to hide, whether he or she knows it or not. Rendell also takes the serial killer novel and twists its now-tired cliches into something altogether different and far more unusual.

And yet, something’s missing.

The ingredients are all present, beginning with the claustrophobic setting of the antiques shop and upstairs flats owned by Inez Ferry. By day, she runs the store while keeping a close eye on her employee Zeinab, an “Asian Babe” who flaunts her simultaneous wooing of two rich older men in pursuit of false matrimony. By night, Inez keeps alive her memories of her dead husband, a noted TV detective, and tries to keep her nose out of the suspicious doings of her tenants. What of Will Cobbett, the beautiful young man who has the intellect of a 10-year-old, and his long-suffering Aunt Becky, desperate for a chance at love? Or Jeremy Quick, claiming a sick wife to support? What is Ludmila, the pale young woman with a pseudo-Balkan accent, really up to? Or Freddy, her lover, who spends more time in Inez’s shop instead of his own flat across town?

There’s a curious disconnect between Rendell’s original intentions for the novel and what’s present on the page. It wasn’t until the denouement was approaching that the connections clicked together: She’s trying to be funny. Sometimes it works, especially when Zeinab appears — her scheming and duplicity lend a delicious flavor to the story. But too often, the would-be black humor falls flat because Rendell would rather mock her creations instead of letting them be. That the killer is the most hapless character is certainly ironic, and often amusing, but it isn’t all that believable. *