The Danish crime writer Jussi Adler-Olsen doesn’t fool around. If he wants to creep you out, he knows exactly how to do it. Take this passage from his latest Department Q novel, VICTIM 2117 (Dutton, 480 pp., $28), in which the villain torments a man named Assad by sending him a message about his abducted wife, Marwa. “It said that he made sure Marwa lost our third child,” Assad discloses, “and that he raped Marwa and my daughters every day, and that every time they gave birth, he immediately killed the child.” Has a certain sadistic ring to it, doesn’t it? That’s how we know we are indeed reading Adler-Olsen, whose style might best be described as literary brutalism.

Fans of this eccentric series of police procedurals might recognize Assad as the sweet guy who keeps the Copenhagen Police Department supplied with scrumptious snacks and robust Arab coffee. Here, we discover his real name (Zaid al-Asadi), learn about his extensive military background in Iraq and Afghanistan, and become acquainted with his personal history. Aside from the fact that he doesn’t resemble the person we met in previous books, this Assad is an interesting character, embroiled in an international terrorist plot.

A second story line involves a suicidal photojournalist named Joan who finds a reason to live when he forges a bond with a dead woman, a refugee who has washed up on the Cyprus shore. (“The clear, open gaze of her eyes hit him. Why did this happen? the eyes asked. … ‘I’ll find out,’ he said, and closed her eyes. ‘I promise.’”) Although less elaborately plotted than the central narrative, this simpler story covers a similar theme about the plight of refugees and does it with more heart.

Yet another plot thread deals with a computer gamer named Alexander, who is coming up on his 2,117th win, at which point he intends to cut off a bunch of human heads with a samurai sword. A total cuckoo, Alex is more suited to the author’s macabre gifts than either of those good guys, Assad and Joan. While it’s nice to see the tender side of Adler-Olsen, a nut job with a samurai sword brings out his true talent.

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C. J. Box’s straight-shooter hero, Joe Pickett, is back in Saddlestring, Wyo., protecting his patch of wilderness from evil men and ugly beasts. LONG RANGE (Putnam, 368 pp., $28) finds the game warden called home from the Teton wilderness, where he and a posse of other lawmen had trekked to recover the body of an elk-hunting guide who had been mauled by a grizzly bear. Seems that back in Twelve Sleep County, someone took a long-range shot at a local judge, accidentally hitting his wife instead.

The judge suspects a drive-by, but we know the sniper is a sharpshooter whose expertise is described with impressive precision and heart-gripping suspense. That’s enough to make a suspect of Joe’s good friend Nate Romanowski, a skilled marksman and master falconer who named his baby Kestrel. That’s a red herring for sure (Nate always seems to be a suspect in this series), but Box makes up for the gaffe with good characters, an extra-good story and great scenes of life and death in the wilderness.

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If I were a 14-year-old girl (the target audience of this Y.A. mystery), I would feel cheated by Emily Arsenault’s ALL THE PRETTY THINGS (Delacorte, 352 pp., paper, $17.99). The premise is so enticing: A murder at a New Hampshire amusement park gets solved by the teenage daughter of the park’s owner. Ivy is a smart, resourceful girl, more of a grown-up than her crude, rather stupid father, who bought Fabuland without knowing a thing about how to run it. When Ethan Lavoie, who worked in the maintenance department, fell to his death from a train trestle, Ivy’s best friend, Morgan, climbed to the top of the Ferris wheel and wouldn’t come down. That stunt put Morgan in the psych ward and left Ivy to figure things out by herself. Ivy is one smart kid, and Fabuland has some cool rides, like the Laser Coaster, which is painted neon green and looks like “an exotic snake zipping along the grass.” But there isn’t anything particularly mysterious in this mystery, except why someone doesn’t bump off Ivy’s abominable father.

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Playing favorites? Who, me? When it comes to the short stories in Don Winslow’s collection, BROKEN (Morrow, 352 pp., $27.99), I plead guilty as charged. Actually, it’s a tossup between the title story, an operatically violent tale of brotherly revenge, and “The San Diego Zoo,” a comic caper about a fugitive chimpanzee armed with a gun and plenty of simian attitude. “I know something’s broken in me,” admits Jimmy McNabb, a New Orleans street cop who goes off the rails when his younger brother, Danny, is tortured and murdered. “You’re an angry man, Jimmy,” his mother tells him. “You were an angry boy. … You hate for the sake of hating.” After the violence in the title story, the humor of “The San Diego Zoo” comes as a welcome palate cleanser. Frankly, I never knew that Winslow, a writer noted for the emotive intensity of his storytelling, had it in him. But one priceless scene — of a little guy in a gold lamé jockstrap and dog collar being led around on a leash by a great big guy wearing a Superman costume (“complete with cape”) — pretty much did it for me.