Many journalists consider themselves admirably equipped to turn out crime fiction. Occasionally, they’re even right: Tony Hillerman, for instance, or Patricia D. Cornwell. All That Remains (373 pages. Scribners. $20), due in mid-August, is the third in Cornwall’s dead-on series about Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Virginia’s chief medical examiner is a brainy physician-attorney and sensational cook made mortal by her lousy tennis game and miserable love life. This time out, Scarpetta is tracking a couples-only serial killer with a bizarre MO and no apparent motive. Operating suspiciously near a CIA training camp, he removes his victims’ socks and shoes and leaves behind a jack of hearts. Politics hovers over the investigation like a toxic fog. Scarpetta is variously assisted and thwarted by a colorful supporting cast, including her irascible cop sidekick, Pete Marino, and a justifiably paranoid Washington Post reporter. A clinical realist, Scarpetta nonetheless takes her best advice from a backcountry psychic with more credibility than teeth: “Don’t always trust what you hear,” she says. “Be careful what you believe.”

Maybe Suzy Wetlaufer got the nerve to write Judgment Call (431 pages. Morrow. $20) after her old Miami Herald colleague Edna Buchanan crossed over to fiction with “Nobody Lives Forever.” That wasn’t a great book, but it was pretty good; next to the sloppy “Judgment Call,” it is “Crime and Punishment.” A cover squib notes that Wetlaufer graduated with highest honors from Harvard. So did her heroine, a gorgeous, rich Miami newspaper reporter. But Sherry Estabrook must be history’s stupidest summa cum laude. When a hit kid (16) for a local drug queen meets Estabrook in a school parking lot and offers to spill his guts, she bites. And the deeper she gets into his violent, vengeful story, the more she trusts the little psychopath. All she smells, above the stench of corpses, is a Pulitzer. What the discerning reader might sniff is a stinker. But “Judgment Call,” complete with a class-conflict subtext, was calculated to sell-gore, rolled in cocaine and baked in subtropical sun, usually does. Disney has already optioned the book for Demi Moore; foreign rights have been sold. Maybe it’ll gain something in the translation into Urdu or Mandarin.

It’s hard to imagine that Some Clouds (163 pages. Viking. $19), by the Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, could be any more compelling in the original Spanish than in William I. Neuman’s English version. Taibo manages to be simultaneously expansive and economical, qualities he imparts to his literate slob of a detective, Hector Belascoaran Shayne. Belascoaran, who has a glass eye and a correspondence school PI’s license, has always liked “the soft sound ideas made when they came together inside his head.” He hasn’t made his bed in four years, but he makes up for it by thinking elegantly. Catching up the threads of what appears to be a straightforward if weird murder case, he uncovers a snarl of political corruption in Mexico City. In a very funny inside move, Taibo makes himself a character in his own web of a story, with Belascoaran trying to save him from being kidnapped. The plot is unusually taut, and he writes with the legato phrasing of a great composer.

Sharp-eyed fans of Ruth Rendell may detect an alter ego within an alter ego in the latest Inspector Wexford mystery, Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter (378 pages. Mysterious Press. $19.95). The British writer also works as the pseudonymous Barbara Vine-a name very close to Barry Vine, a laconic, insightful new sergeant who plays a crucial role in cracking the case. In the four years since the last Wexford book, Rendell has produced some disappointing thrillers, relying too much on her gift for creepiness and not enough on her formidable imagination. But back with her bearish Sussex detective, she’s flexing all the right muscles. In “Gunner’s Daughter”-a country-house murder minus the gentility-three members of a dysfunctional landed family are slaughtered during dinner. The only survivor is an emotionally crippled teenager, Daisy, who has blocked out important details. An insignificant robbery, Wexford is sure, is a smoke screen for the homicides. But to blow it away, he must first examine his odd obsession with Daisy and his torturous rage toward his own daughter. Rendell gives him breathing room, and the result is an incisive character study. Here, she deals with the aftermath of violence, not with violence itself, and can make the homiest detail seem sinister. Her chilling image of a cat gazing into a pool of carp may haunt you as no bloodbath will.

The unhappy families of Bensington, Mass., form the troubled heart of Andrew Coburn’s No Way Home (282 pages. Dutton. $20). In the dappled, overgrown town, everyone is so interconnected that a fracture in one household causes a break in another. Coburn weaves together all the imperatives of American life-money, power, sex, religion, baseball-but he concentrates on death, usually unnatural. When a popular middle-aged couple is murdered in the backyard, James Morgan, police chief and compassionate Don Juan, must try to stop the violence from spreading. The story itself is extremely good, but the imagery-a pony-faced woman has a mouth that’s “a rupture of heavy teeth”-is even better. And Coburn’s sad and vivid portrait of the Yankee redneck Rayballs, who would fit right in at a Snopes reunion, gives the book real distinction.