Sorry, America, but you’re going to have to change your attitude. Vast numbers of people in the Heartland continue to think of New York City as a terrifying hotbed of crime, but in the latest report, it ranks as the fourth safest large city in the country, behind only San Jose, Honolulu, and El Paso.

Not that you would know this by reading some of the summer’s recent mystery releases, in which fictional murders reach such staggering numbers that it appears as if the city is in the throes of a crime wave rivaling Prohibition-era Chicago.

Following his outstanding first novel last year, “Smoked,” Patrick Quinlan offers a roller coaster of a crime story, “The Takedown” (St. Martin’s Minotaur, 263 pages, $21.95). It’s Christmas Eve in Brooklyn and Dick Miller, a former con who’s trying to go straight and failing (much like the hero of Matthew Klein’s “Con Ed”), stops at a bar and winds up plastered. When he goes to his car, he finds his gorgeous girlfriend waiting for him — in the trunk and filled with bullet holes. He doesn’t think he killed her, but is too drunk to remember for sure, so drives around for a few days with Dot rattling around with the spare tire.

Dot may have been a runner-up in the Miss Ohio beauty pageant, but she’s not exactly a girl scout. Her former lover was a drug dealer who’s being chased by members of cartels. She’s been scamming her employer out of buckets of cash and has the key to a safe deposit box stuffed with a million dollars, so there were plenty of people who wanted her dead.

The bumbling Miller, trying to find the real killer while not getting killed himself, feels like a fugitive from an Elmore Leonard novel in this fast-paced, sharply witty thriller.

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Lee Vance is a Harvard MBA, as was John D. MacDonald, and he’s apparently given up a life of money for a life of crime, producing a true nail-biter of a first novel, “Restitution” (Knopf, 322 pages, $23.95).

Opening with a plot ripped off from any of a hundred “Law & Order” episodes, this is the story of Wall Street superstar Peter Tyler, who has it all: fabulous wife, fabulous house, fabulous wealth, plus he’s good looking, funny, smart, and athletic — you know, the kind of guy you want to hate. Then, in a New York minute, he loses it all, and then it gets really grim.

When his wife is found murdered, who do you think the police move to the top of the suspect list? Right. And do you think it gets any better for him when they learn that the happy couple have been living apart, and that he’s had a mistress? Right again. All of this is established in the first chapter, and the pace never slows down.

Tyler sets out to find the real killer, and readers will go from envying him to despising him to rooting for him as his relentless quest brings him face-to-face with guys so bad and so tough they could use the Crips and the Bloods as their housemaids.

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Since we’re in the financial world, a new anthology, “Wall Street Noir” (Akashic, 382 pages, $15.95), presents a close-up look at this fascinating milieu with its built-in opportunity for nefarious activity. An outstanding line-up of authors has produced one of the best entries yet in the long-running series in Akashic’s erratic but worthwhile “Noir” series.

Editor Peter Spiegelman happily includes one of his own stories, along with fine work by John Burdett, the always excellent Peter Blauner, Jason Starr, Reed Farrell Coleman, Richard Aleas, and Jim Fusilli, among others.

Even if you’re like me and have only a passing acquaintance with money, it doesn’t make the subject any less interesting. This engrossing collection does not require an MBA to understand that there are a lot of people who will do any number of really nasty things to get their hands on the green stuff.

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Charles J. Hynes has been the Brooklyn district attorney for 17 years, and you have to believe he’s a better D.A. than a writer, or else no one in that very large borough would ever have been convicted of a crime. “Triple Homicide” (St. Martin’s, 278 pages, $24.95), which has a good story to tell, is so poorly written that Mr. Hynes should be arrested for attempted murder of the English language.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.