No fluffy bunny scenes in THE RABBIT HUNTER (Knopf, 512 pp., $27.95), just a sanguinary psycho-killer suspense story by Lars Kepler, a popular Swedish husband-and-wife writing team. There is, indeed, the sweet voice of a child chanting a nursery rhyme before each death. (“Ten little rabbits, all dressed in white / Tried to get to heaven on the end of a kite.”) But that’s more a grace note than a plot point in a story that hops from sophisticated political terrorism to graphic gore.
Susan Furlong’s SHATTERED JUSTICE (Kensington, 293 pp., $26) is set in the remote Tennessee town of Bone Gap, where you’ll find armed militia encampments pitched in the woods and male strippers doing the grind at local bars. The discovery of a body in a playground brings out Brynn Callahan, a sheriff’s deputy, and her dog, Wilco, both veterans of the wars in the Middle East. In this sober series, a severed tongue, accompanied by a warning to “Speak no evil,” passes for down-home humor.
The local lawman in John McMahon’s folksy police procedural THE EVIL MEN DO (Putnam, 330 pp., $27) thinks that Mason Falls, Ga., is heaven on earth. When rapacious land-grabbers threaten to ruin it, murder ensues. The story of real-estate moguls running amok is sadly familiar, but it’s well told by McMahon, who writes with narrative flair and has the wit to name a biker bar “Motor Mouth.”
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