Faye Kellerman, Sara Paretsky and more in a curated Lilith selection:

Murder 101: A Decker/Lazarus Novel, by Faye Kellerman

As a detective lieutenant with the LAPD, Peter Decker witnessed enough ugliness and chaos for a lifetime. Now, he and his devoted wife Rina Lazarus are ready to enjoy the quiet beauty of upstate New York.

But working for the Greenbury Police department isn't as fulfilling as Decker hoped. Decker is underwhelmed and frustrated by his new partner, a former Harvard student with a bad attitude. Just when he thinks he's made a mistake, Decker is called to his first real Greenbury case: a possible break-in at the local cemetery.

Excerpts:

"The good news was he now had a manageable desk job, fielding calls that centered on senior citizens with chest pains, missing pets, and controlling drunken teenagers following Saturday night binges..."

"The kid was on time, which would have been fine except that the students were on Jewish Standard Time."

Lineup, by Liad Shoham.

After a brutal rape disrupts a quiet Tel Aviv neighborhood, baffled detectives find no clues, no eyewitnesses, and no suspects. The father of the shattered victim refuses to rest until justice is done, so he begins his own investigation. Keeping watch over his daughter's apartment from the street, he notices Ziv Nevo lurking in the shadows. All circumstances point to Nevo's guilt, and it appears the case is closed. But appearances can be deceiving.

Breakdown by Sara Paretsky.

Carmilla, Queen of the Night, is a shape-shifting raven whose fictional exploits thrill girls all over the world. When tweens in Chicago's Carmilla Club hold an initiation ritual in an abandones cemetery, they stumble on an actual corpse, a man stabbed through the heart in a vampire-style slaying.

The girls include daughters of some of Chicago's most powerful families: the grandfather of one, Chaim Salanter, is among the world's wealthiest men; the mother of another, Sophy Durango is running to the U.S. Senate.

For V.I. Warshawski, the questions multiply faster than the answers. Is the killing linked to a hostile media campaign against Durango? Or to Chaim Salanter's childhood in Nazi-occupied Lithuania?

Claire Dewitt and the Bohemian Highway by Sara Gran.

Book Two in the Claire Dewitt series.

When Paul Casablancas, Claire DeWitt's musician ex-boyfriend, is found dead in his San Francisco home, the police are convinced it's a simple robbery. But Claire know nothing is ever simple.

With the help of her new assistant, Claude, Claire follows the clues, finding hints to Paul's fate in her other cases--especially those of a missing girl in the gritty 1980s East Village and a modern-day miniature horse theft in Marin.

Claire begins to understand the words of the enigmatic French detective Jacques Silette: "The detective won't know what he is capable of until he encounters a mystery that pierces his own heart."

An addictive new adventure featuring an irresistible heroine.

Except:

"It was like downtown Brooklyn--a lot of beautiful old buildings, built for the respectable middle-class shopper, now filled with 'New York style' clothing stores and shops that sold gold teeth and fish-and-chips restaurants and, now, medical marijuana joints....

Homeless people congregated under an awning at Broadway and Thirteenth, trying to stay dry as it started to rain. A few blocks farther a man in a wheelchair weaved in and out of traffic, asking for change, his wheels slippery on the wet pavement. He knocked on my window. I didn't want to open it.

He kept knocking. The light changed but I didn't go--I wasn't sure how close the man was, if the wheels of his chair intersected with the wheels of my battered Mercedes. He was annoying, but I didn't want to kill him."