Sarah Weinman

Known for her psychopathic antiheroes and novels such as “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “The Price of Salt,” Highsmith was a tangle of contradictions.

Grace D. Li’s debut, “Portrait of a Thief,” is both a heist novel and a reckoning.

The note — found at a murder scene in Simone St. James’s spine-tingling new novel, “The Book of Cold Cases” — seemed to implicate one...