Just asking: If I can’t get chosen for jury duty in a no-drama lawsuit, how come a serial killer manages to be seated in a double murder case? According to Steve Cavanagh’s wickedly clever courtroom drama, THIRTEEN (Flatiron, $26.99), what it takes is an ingenious mind and a supreme feat of engineering. That plus the gall to murder any potential jurors who stand in your way.

Joshua Kane is one of those monsters whose wicked brilliance makes them unforgettable. After targeting a prospective juror who meets his needs, Kane executes a masterful maneuver to kill this innocent nobody, steal his jury summons and impersonate him at what’s being called “the murder trial of the century.” Why Kane would want to adjudicate the fate of Robert Solomon, a movie star accused of murdering his wife and his bodyguard, is an open question at this point. But the young actor’s defense team includes Eddie Flynn, an attorney who picked up some neat tricks in his 10 years as a con artist, so there’s hope for the poor guy.

Although the real fun happens in the courtroom, Cavanagh has actually written a two-for-one, a courtroom drama that’s also a serial killer mystery. These genres don’t exactly complement each other, but they don’t bump heads either.

To be sure, the serial killer gets all the best scenes and much of the choicest language. (What we would call coldblooded murders, Kane describes as making certain “mortal adjustments to the jury pool to increase his chances.”) The novel’s accounts of these killings, it should be noted, are extremely graphic, especially since Kane keeps up a running commentary as he goes about his work. “The side of the skull is not as well protected as the frontal cranium,” we learn in one of a series of monologues we could live without but are shamefully willing to share.

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Abbie Cullen, the heroine of JP Delaney’s mind-bending novel THE PERFECT WIFE (Ballantine, $27), is a beautiful woman, a gifted artist and a loving spouse. But she can’t compete with the flawless works of artificial intelligence her husband, Tim, designs for Scott Robotics. Nor is it to her advantage when Tim creates a pliable replicant with all her endowments and none of her flaws. Who was it who said, “There is surely nothing finer than to educate a young thing for oneself”? Oh, right. Hitler.

Delaney takes domestic suspense beyond its comfort zone. To be sure, there’s romantic tension, marital discord, even betrayal, as well as the demands of caring for a severely autistic child. But there are other issues to chew on: the worship of beauty and the demand for perfection, the ethics of artificial intelligence, the moral responsibilities of playing God. Not to mention the quandary that arises when a robot develops a soul, a real problem when “people don’t want their robots to have feelings.”

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Don’t trust a dude with a lion’s head tattoo on his palm. And don’t expect to see anyone picking dates at the Paradise Date Farm. These are a few of the lessons the San Diego private eye Roland Ford learns the hard way in THE LAST GOOD GUY (Putnam, $27), a laid-back regional mystery in a surprisingly mellow series by T. Jefferson Parker.

There are some terrific villains to boo in this adrenaline-charged adventure involving a decommissioned nuclear generating station, “its spent fuel rods cooling in their casks. Cooling for the next 100,000 years. Protected from earthquake, tsunami, thieves and terrorists” by a dicey security company. But we keep coming back to Ford, a former Marine who is plenty tough, but gentle enough to track down a teenage runaway last seen in the company of her bad-news boyfriend. “It’s a weakness in my line of work, hoping that people are telling the truth,” admits Ford, who’s the kind of guy you’d trust with both a 14-year-old girl and a nuclear reactor.

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Julia Keller’s emotion-charged mystery THE COLD WAY HOME (Minotaur, $27.99) opens with the birth of a baby — but don’t get all misty-eyed over that. The infant, a boy, is born to a drug-addicted woman who hadn’t even known she was pregnant. Where? “In a toilet in the Burger Boss in a bleak town in a state swamped by its troubles.” The town in question is economically depressed, spiritually drained Acker’s Gap, W.Va.

Given the depths of human misery in that opening scene, it comes as a relief when the three private detectives who operate an agency simply called Investigations are hired to find Maggie Folsom’s runaway daughter, Dixie Sue, a sweet girl who is “kinda slow.” But that mission also turns tragic when a young woman’s body is found near the ruins of Wellwood, an asylum for “incurables.”

Keller’s sleuths are easy to like and the murder story is moving; but the object of fascination here is Wellwood, a state-run mental institution with a dark history as a repository for “rebellious, unruly women” whose husbands unloaded them at the institution to be lobotomized. And you thought that “a black wave of overdoses from fentanyl-spiked heroin” created enough grief for one Appalachian town.