MYSTERIES
For most of us, there’s something in our past—a person, a relationship, a place, an incident—that, forgotten for months, even years, occasionally re-enters our conscious minds. For Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Reginald Wexford, it’s his conviction of three-plus decades that a man he met while a young policeman is a serial killer.

MYSTERIES
One finishes an outstanding trilogy with regret, but also, in the case of Rennie Airth’s three novels featuring John Madden, with abundant admiration. Airth introduced Madden in 1999’s “River of Darkness” set in 1921, continued with 2004’s “The Blood-Dimmed Tide” set in 1932 and now brings the series to a conclusion with the remarkable The Dead of Winter (416 pages, Viking, $25.95).

The sins-of-the-fathers plotline has been around since the Old Testament and the Greek myths, but Northern Virginia writer Ellen Crosby gives it her own twist in The Riesling Retribution (272 pages, Scribner, $25). The fourth entry in Crosby’s series featuring vineyard owner Lucie Montgomery begins with a tornado that destroys some grapevines, forces Lucie to take cover under an old bridge and unearths human bones from a shallow grave on her property, which straddles Loudoun and Fauquier counties.

MYSTERIES
Finding a fresh premise for a serial-killer tale must be the hardest part of writing thriller mysteries. But Linda Castillo has come up with a story of striking originality in Sworn to Silence (321 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.95). When she was 14, Kate Burkholder was living with her Amish family in northeastern Ohio when she was raped. The attack came after four gruesome sex murders and left Kate traumatized. The horrific assault played a major role in her decision to leave the Amish life four years later for Columbus, where she became a patrol officer and eventually a homicide detective.

The missing-child story has been done so often that it takes something extraordinary to make it rise above the commonplace. And that is what John Hart has accomplished in his third novel, The Last Child (394 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.95). A year ago, Johnny Merrimon’s twin sister, Alyssa, vanished while walking home from school in their eastern North Carolina town when their dad failed to pick her up. Now 13, Johnny lives with his damaged mother, Katharine. Alyssa has never been found, and dad Spencer has disappeared. But Johnny is determined to learn Alyssa’s fate; he often ditches school to investigate the town’s residents, checking off houses from his town map and putting a special mark by the ones inhabited by “bad men.“

Combining a cause with creativity in mystery fiction can be tricky, but Donna Leon succeeds—as she has done before—in About Face (288 pages, Atlantic Monthly Press, $24), her 18th novel featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice police. The cause is environmentalism, and Leon vividly depicts an Italy plagued with waters sullied by pollution, with carcinogens released into the air by factories, with garbage piling up in the streets.

MYSTERIES
The roll of high practitioners of the British mystery includes Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell—and countless others Britons (and not a few Americans) whose U.K.-set novels have become one of the most popular subsets of the mystery genre. With spring’s renewal comes a crop of fresh examples for Anglophiles or mystery lovers—or the many who fall into both categories—to enjoy.

MYSTERIES Athreat of mass terror, a government complicit in the danger, the aftermath of war, financial turmoil. That may sound like a contemporary story, but it’s the plot of Among the Mad (320 pages, Henry Holt, $25), the sixth installment in Jacqueline Winspear’s literate and haunting series featuring Maisie Dobbs, psychologist and investigator.

Does winter have you longing to go somewhere new, try something different, simply escape? That’s the beauty of books, and these five mysteries—set in South Africa, France, Canada, Austria and Turkey—are just the ticket.

. . . In the benighted days of apartheid, South Africa was a cauldron of passion, intrigue and inequality, all of which Malla Nunn brings into play in her debut novel, A Beautiful Place to Die (388 pages, Atria, $25).

MYSTERIES
If you’re looking for some murderous diversion after the holidays but find your budget stressed from seasonal gift-giving, cheer up. These five mysteries are all original—they are not reprints of hardcover books—and all come in the form of mass-market paperbacks, so your wallet won’t fall victim to killer prices.

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MYSTERIES Many mystery writers find a formula and are content to stick with it. That’s not necessarily bad—some are top-rate—but the pattern can become tedious. Elizabeth Ironside—the pseudonym of Lady Catherine Manning, wife of a former British ambassador to the United States—pens no series, repeats no story and follows only one rule: exceptional quality. The latest of her five books to make its initial American appearance, A Good Death (336 pages, Felony & Mayhem, $24.95) is no exception.