Don’t you just love a funeral? In detective fiction, I mean. Because at a good funeral, somebody is always passing a mission of honor along to somebody else. Harry Bosch inherits one of these quests in Michael Connelly’s nifty new police procedural, THE NIGHT FIRE (Little, Brown, $29). After John Jack Thompson, Bosch’s mentor at the Los Angeles Police Department, is respectfully laid to rest, the veteran cop’s widow hands his protégé a “murder book” filled with 20 years’ worth of notes on John Hilton, a nobody whose unsolved murder haunts everyone who comes across it. Not because the case is particularly remarkable, but because nobody should be a nobody.

Detective Renée Ballard, who works the midnight shift (known to one and all as the Late Show) for the Hollywood Division, Bosch’s own territory before he retired, does the sensitive inside work for him. But Ballard is an interesting character in her own right — partly because she lives in a tent on the beach with her dog, a pitbull-boxer mix named Lola, but mainly because her sense of independence is so absolutely pure. Not even her nemesis, the misogynistic Capt. Robert Olivas, can get through her armor.

On the other end of the moral spectrum we find Bosch’s half brother, the spectacularly shifty defense attorney Mickey Haller, who becomes the third detective in this ever-expanding investigation. For no good reason, or at least for no reason that has to do with John Hilton, Connelly has given Haller a court case that brilliantly displays the natural-born talents and sleight-of-hand tactics that have earned him his reputation as “a courtroom magician.”

There’s something for everyone in this jam-packed plot: murder, arson, professional rivalry, salty cop talk and noisy domestic disputes that turn very ugly very quickly. Me, I go for the procedural details: who does what and how things get done from the minute the cops on shift at the Hollywood Division are sent to investigate a murder. Connelly is pretty much the current dean of procedural writers. His main characters — Bosch, Ballard and Haller — use different methods, but nobody misses a trick.

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Corie Geller is the amateur sleuth in Susan Isaacs’s new suburban mystery. And what a mouth on her! No sooner do we meet Corie, in TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE (Atlantic Monthly, $26), than she’s making cracks about her friend Phoebe, who resells vintage clothing on eBay and exudes “a vague aroma of dead people’s closets.” Phoebe is one of the gang of seven who lost their real jobs in the Great Recession of 2008 and now meet for lunch every Wednesday to brood over their freelance careers. Technically, Corie wasn’t laid off from the F.B.I.’s Joint Terrorism Task Force; she left it to marry Josh, a widower and a federal judge. But let’s face it, suburban life is dull for a former agent, and in her boredom she’s been studying one of her own crowd, a packaging designer named Pete Delaney. Why is he so watchful? Why does he keep changing cellphones? Or does something about him just remind her of her own undercover self? Isaacs strains to make a workable plot out of this thin gruel, but once she’s in the groove she has us chasing Corie all over the map, charmed by this motormouth sleuth’s snappy wit and awed by her courage. Or is it recklessness?

♦

It’s 1919 in Charles Todd’s melancholy mystery A CRUEL DECEPTION (Morrow, $26.99) and the Great War has finally ended. But, as one survivor notes, “when the fighting stopped, we realized that nothing would ever be the same again.” Bess Crawford, the dauntless nurse who stars in this enduring series, is in Paris, searching for a friend’s son among the walking wounded shuffling through the city’s bombed-out streets.

Lt. Lawrence Minton is meant to be part of the English delegation to the peace conference, but when Bess finds him he’s a drug-addled wreck, haunted by some horror she must discover and resolve before she can return him to London. As always, Todd’s intense feelings for the traumatized survivors of war make one mother’s son the broken hero of an entire generation of lost souls.

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What a smart change of pace for Deborah Crombie in A BITTER FEAST (Morrow, $25.99), a classic village whodunit that challenges her sophisticated city sleuths, Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid of Scotland Yard and his wife, Detective Inspector Gemma James. This power couple is supposed to be enjoying a restful weekend in the bucolic Cotswolds, but a fatal road accident and a series of suspicious deaths swiftly shatter the peace at their host’s country house.

Crombie has a deft hand with plot, and this one is enriched by characters like Viv Holland, the gifted chef at the local pub, and Fergus O’Reilly, who becomes a person of interest because he looks good in a fedora. But the book’s beauty is in its descriptions of pastoral life: the handsome dogs, the luscious meals and, best of all, the glorious gardens. Murder has some damn nerve, disrupting the tranquillity of such a heavenly place.