Also of interest ... in big-name mysteries

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

by Stieg Larsson

(Knopf, $27)

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The final volume in the blockbuster “Millennium” trilogy opens with its tattooed heroine being rushed to a Swedish hospital with a bullet in her skull, said Brendan Bernhard in TheNewYorkSun.com. Though Lisbeth Salander “is arguably a male fantasy object,” there’s no denying the appeal of a 4-foot-11 spitfire who “refuses to stop fighting back” and also refuses to be a mere caricature. Stieg Larsson’s swift-moving finale “verges on a celebration of retributive female violence against men.”

Innocent

by Scott Turow

(Grand Central, $28)

Twenty-three years after publishing Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow has written a “superbly paced mystery” as its sequel, said Terrence Rafferty in The New York Times. Rusty Sabich, now a judge, has once again broken his marital vows and wound up accused of murder. Despite the familiar plot, Turow has returned to Sabich for the best of reasons: to explore the many ways in which we all “fail to understand ourselves.” The result is a serious novel that’s both “gripping and darkly self-reflective.”

61 Hours

by Lee Child

(Delacorte, $28)

Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series “gets better and better,” said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. Child’s “tough, cerebral drifter” has been slugging bad guys and fixing wrongs for 14 novels now, but the latest installment begins to peel away his shell. While marooned in a South Dakota town, Reacher is drawn into the locals’ battle with an international meth ring. But two new female characters, and the questions they ask about Reacher, provide the most satisfying surprises.

Finding Chandra

by Scott Higham & Sari Horwitz

(Scribner, $26)

This true account of a famous botched murder investigation “is a triumph of investigative journalism,” said Julia Dahl in the San Francisco Chronicle. When Washington Post reporters Higham and Horwitz dug into the evidence surrounding the 2001 slaying of Washington intern Chandra Levy, they accomplished what police and the FBI failed to do: exonerate ex-congressman and philanderer Gary Condit and identify a Salvadoran immigrant as the likely killer.