Three noteworthy novels worth reading, or giving.

“Venetian Vespers” by John Banville. (Knopf, 302 pp., $30.) For a self-described member of the London literati, Evelyn Dolman is a surprisingly naïve and gullible narrator. Then again, the other characters in Banville’s creepily atmospheric novel might well be a particularly adroit batch of schemers. Set in Venice in the winter of 1900, this stuffy British striver’s account of his brief, ill-fated marriage to an American heiress is, from the outset, anything but tranquil. Dolman can’t get through a single night in their rented palazzo before his wife mysteriously vanishes. Soon he will become, as he puts it, “the main suspect in a crime that as far as anyone knew had not been committed.”

A British newlywed, circa 1900, finds that his wife has vanished and that he himself is, as he puts it, “the main suspect in a crime that as far as anyone knew had not been committed.” (Courtesy/Knopf)

The story of Dolman’s predicament bristles with dramatic fodder: family tensions, a vast fortune, a landlord obsessed with reciting his ancestors’ “age-old” depredations, a devastatingly lovely expat accompanied by her hard-drinking, insistently charming brother. But what emerges from the dark shadows of the plot is an even darker psychological portrait of a man forced to grapple with his own inner demons. “In the world as I now know it to be,” Dolman confides, “anything is possible, and there is no enormity of which we are incapable, any of us.”

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“The Book of I” by David Greig. (Europa, 160 pp., $24.) The title refers both to an early medieval name for Iona and to an unfinished copy of the gospels that survives in its monastery’s scriptorium after Norse raiders slaughter most of the Scottish island’s inhabitants. The only survivors are a young monk who chose to hide deep in the muck of a latrine rather than stay with his martyred brethren and a woman with a talent for brewing mead who cares more about the fate of her bees than that of her abusive — and now thankfully deceased — blacksmith husband. They will be joined, initially reluctantly and eventually enthusiastically, by a half-caste Norseman left for dead by his companions.

Greig’s description of this unusual trio’s occupation of the island is a jaunty mix of high and low: of affecting devotion and rough high-jinks, sometimes tender and sometimes raunchy. Although new to Christianity, the warrior Grimur believes he was saved in order to protect guilt-ridden Brother Martin as he resumes work on the holy book. However, it is Una, the “mead wife,” whose potions and common sense may allow them to eke out a living in a place that’s been dismissed by the local bishop as “a massacre waiting to happen.”

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“The Art of a Lie” by Laura Shepherd-Robinson. (Atria, 290 pp., $28.) Shepherd-Robinson’s novel is filled with fascinating glimpses of mid-18th-century London, where her heroine, the recently widowed Hannah Cole, runs a confectionery shop in Piccadilly. As a woman working in trade, she occupies a very vulnerable position, one made even more precarious when her murdered husband’s recently discovered bank account attracts the attention of Westminster’s chief magistrate, the novelist Henry Fielding, who suspects it of being acquired “through nefarious means.”

Shepherd-Robinson uses Fielding’s real-life attempt to organize the city’s first police force as one element in a lively tale of double-dealing and subterfuge that will involve not just Hannah but a trader called William Devereux, with whom her husband is said to have been acquainted. As the narrative perspective moves between Hannah and William, artful lies abound. Hannah may not be quite what she appears to be, and neither may handsome William, who volunteers to help track down the source of her new wealth. Unpleasant revelations are in store, even as Hannah’s business begins to thrive. The reason? The recipe, thanks to William, for an Italian treat called “iced cream.”

Alida Becker was an editor at the New York Times Book Review for 30 years. She was the first winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for excellence in reviewing.

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