My usual beat for The New Yorker is political and legal commentary, and so I’ll ask, in advance of listing my favorite recent mystery novels, for the forbearance of the genre’s true specialists. I’m not the person who can say, for example, which of Louise Penny’s twenty “Chief Inspector Gamache” novels is the best. (“Still Life,” a friend tells me.) But there are overlaps in expertise: most of the best mysteries deal with the imperfect fit between the law and justice and with, as in politics, skewed balances of power, if only in the home, and the tension between public and private identities. I love the puzzles these kinds of books present. Here are four greats from the past twenty years, plus a bonus.

“The Trespasser,” by Tana French

French has written ten novels (the “Dublin Murder Squad” sextet, the “Cal Hooper” trilogy, and one stand-alone), and the real debate is what order of greatness to put them in. Nine of them were chosen by readers for a recent Times list of the “Best Thrillers of the Century,” the most by any writer. “The Trespasser” is the only one that didn’t make that list. I stand by my pick. The book, about a young Irish woman murdered in her hard-won home, is the French novel that most often comes back to me unbidden. I’ve sometimes taken it off the shelf just to reread the final interrogation scene.

“When Will There Be Good News?” by Kate Atkinson

As with French, there is a lot of good Atkinson in the mystery (and non-mystery) department. “When Will There Be Good News?” is the third in her “Jackson Brodie” series, and an exemplar of her narrative control over chaos. Set mostly in Scotland, the book involves the disappearance of a woman and her baby in the long wake of a family murder. Reggie Chase, a babysitter who pulls Brodie into the case, returns as a detective herself in later Atkinson novels.

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” by Stieg Larsson

Its rich afterlife alone might earn this novel a place on the list: much imitated (and parodied); an accelerant in the rise of Nordic Noir; the template for a certain kind of hacker-detective; the basis for two sequels and two movies. And yet, upon first reading, I was ambivalent—put off in part because of all the hype but also, perhaps, because of what the book seemed to present as the available responses to sexual trauma. When I picked it up again this summer, though, I found it more nuanced, engaging, and multilayered than I had remembered.

“Wild Dark Shore,” by Charlotte McConaghy

This one is a bit of a wild card, a crossover into the climate-fiction genre. The setting is a scientific station on an Antarctic island that must be evacuated because of rapidly rising sea levels—a locked-seed-bank mystery, one might say. A shipwrecked woman confronts the enigma of a missing researcher, an unexplained grave, beached whales, and the question of what can or should be saved. It is, in many ways, a counterweight to “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” offering a very different vision of resilience.

And the bonus: “Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s.” The novels in this boxed set (including Vera Caspary’s “Laura,” Dorothy B. Hughes’s “In a Lonely Place,” and Patricia Highsmith’s “The Blunderer”) are outside this list’s time frame, but the grouping (edited, with notes, by Sarah Weinman) is new. Mid-century America could be an awfully unsettling place.

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P.S. Min Jin Lee recommends “Jane Eyre,” by Charlotte Brontë, because, she says, “the capacity to know a character so intimately of this era is really unusual, and so beautiful.”