Sometimes Rita’s crime-scene pictures are so good that they help detectives solve cases. The reason her work as a forensic photographer for the Albuquerque Police Department is so good, so detailed, so uncanny? She has a conduit to the dead, who show and tell her things no one else would know about their lives and violent deaths. Rita Todacheene, the spiky, complex main character introduced in Ramona Emerson’s haunting series opener, SHUTTER (Soho Crime, 300 pp., $25.95), has a secret. And when the terrible, twisting truth is finally revealed, it comes as a surprise. Hanna’s own history - her father was a convicted murderer - threads through flashbacks about the missing father and son. Things have been so intense since Hugo was born … I’ve barely slept through the night in over a year.” What looks at first like a marriage spat quickly grows complicated: Thomas is involved in a local smuggling ring, and it turns out he has an embittered adult daughter Jenny never knew about. She tells the detectives assigned to the case, Hanna Duncker and Erik Lindgren, “I just wanted to be on my own for a few days. Returning to Öland after a weekend away, Jenny Alströhm discovers her husband, Thomas, and 14-month-old son are missing. It’s too early to say if this will hold for Johanna Mo’s Island Murders cycle, just two books strong, but THE SHADOW LILY (Penguin Books, 418 pp., paper, $16.99) is a solid police procedural that invited me onto the sparsely populated Baltic island of Öland, where nights are pitch-black and villages “sometimes consisted of no more than a few houses.” Like the first book in the series, “The Night Singer,” it’s capably translated from the Swedish by Alice Menzies.

The mark of a promising series is that each installment can stand alone, and readers can begin with any book.

Shutter by Ramona Emerson