Louise Penny wrote the book on escapist mysteries — a dozen of them, in fact, almost all set in the sheltered Canadian village of Three Pines. “It was a haven, a buffer, from the cares and cruelty of the world,” she tells us in GLASS HOUSES (Minotaur, $28.99), a place seemingly so free of malice and discord that Armand Gamache, chief superintendent of the Sûreté du Québec, and his wife, Reine-Marie, have made it their sanctuary. One of the pleasures of returning to this series is visiting old friends in the village like Gabri and Olivier, who run the convivial B&B; the artist Clara Morrow, whose startling portraits will haunt you; and (a personal favorite) Ruth Zardo, a poet who accurately describes herself as “a crazy old woman who prays for Satan and has a duck.”

The strangeness starts with the traditional Halloween party at the local bistro, attended by a masked, hooded figure in a black cloak who reappears the following day to take up sentry duty on the village green. Still as death and silent as the grave, the visitor resists efforts to engage him in conversation. After a while, people just leave him alone and go about their business — all except a Spanish-speaking guest at the B&B who identifies this specter as a cobrador del frac, a collector of unpaid debts (including moral debts) who follows defaulters, shaming them with his remorseless gaze. In the presence of this wraith, the villagers begin to exhume their own guilty secrets.

A creepy twist in the narrative traces the cobrador back to medieval Spain, when plague victims, lepers and witches were consigned to a remote island to die. Those who survived and managed to return to the mainland silently stalked the people who had banished them and, over the years, became mythic figures. In his dark robes, the cobrador becomes a vivid metaphor for opioids like fentanyl, the “modern-day Black Death” that drug cartels are smuggling across the border through Three Pines and into Vermont. If Gamache can’t contain this plague, our last hope may be Superman.

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Welcome to the Crypt, a “celluloid necropolis” for folks like Alex Whitman, a snarky film fanatic who has been hired by another fanatic to find what may be the first motion picture ever made. Jonathan Skariton’s debut novel, SÉANCE INFERNALE (Knopf, $26.95), named for that very item, is a dense but thrilling exploration of the mystery surrounding a film that was said to have predated both Edison and the brothers Lumière, but disappeared, along with its inventor, on a train to Paris in 1890.