In crime fiction, funny is rare. (Yes, I hear you shouting “Elmore Leonard,” but who else comes to mind?) Comedy and violence have a convoluted relationship: We know violence shouldn’t be funny, yet banana peels and movies by the Coen brothers prove otherwise. When writers want to wring laughs from violent behavior in romantic relationships, there is a pervasive understanding that men killing women is disgraceful while women killing men can, in the right hands, be funny. Faced with the terrible things men routinely do — physical abuse, gaslighting, calculating behavior and cruel words — a wife and her trusty frying pan fighting the patriarchy can elicit a silent cheer. As more and more authors write them — and more readers gobble them up — stories of female protagonists/perps on messianic missions to rid the world of bad men (not all men) constitute a genre that has legs.

Alexia Casale’s “The Best Way to Bury Your Husband” (Penguin, $18) gets the general idea right into its title. The book follows four women in abusive relationships pushed over the edge by the pandemic lockdown: Each kills her husband and is then faced with the conundrum of how to get rid of the body of someone who was supposed to be going out only to pick up essentials. After meeting accidentally, these women form the Lockdown Ladies’ Burial Club — Garden Club, to outsiders — and help one another clean up the evidence as well as unpack the baggage they’ve acquired from years of abuse. Casale, who worked as an advocate for victims of domestic violence for more than a decade, was inspired to write the book when the statistics about abuse skyrocketed during the lockdown. While those were extraordinary circumstances, Casale’s book goes beyond the statistics to tell four very human stories — morbid, funny and sadly relevant.

Casale’s book follows other recent successes in the genre. In Ren DeStefano’s “How I’ll Kill You” (Berkley, $17), we meet Sissy and her sisters, Iris and Moody, identical triplets raised in various permutations in foster care. As most foster families are not seeking a three-for-one deal, the sisters learn as children to be stealthy and present a normal front to the world. Now in their 20s, they have reunited and set up a women-owned business you won’t find on Etsy: They use their wiles to lure and kill angry and abusive men. Sissy’s job is mainly plotting and cleanup, while Iris and Moody deliver the death blows, but does it really matter who does what? Since they are identical, they often deceive their victims by having a couple of sisters date him at once. But when Sissy develops real feelings for one of their marks, a charming dork named Edison, the game might be up. Is it the end of the family business or the beginning of a true romance?

There is a gleeful strain of satire in Katy Brent’s “How to Kill Men and Get Away with It” (HQ Digital, $16.99). Kitty Collins, our antiheroine, is “fighting the patriarchy one murder at a time.” She is a wealthy, beautiful and very shrewd young woman, an online influencer who lives and hunts in London. The backstory of what turned Kitty into a serial killer is nothing unusual: A cheating boyfriend sets her off, and once she has disposed of one man, she realizes she enjoys making the world — or just the tony sections of London — free of harassment, catcalls and other forms of male aggression.

Kitty has a code to keep herself grounded: no women, as women spend their lives being victims; no innocents, though she admits this can get tricky; no homeless or down-on-their-luck men, as they have enough to contend with; and no police officers, for obvious reasons. Most important, she strives to remember that killing should serve a higher purpose. As she says: “I don’t want to go around London hacking people to death because I am just an angry woman. The men I kill deserve it. Every last bit of it. So, it’s not actually murder when you look at it that way.” This means, to Kitty’s mind, that she is free to kill a menacing man who follows her home from a bar, a sleazy Tinder date (Tinder has been a real boon for her business) and an old-fashioned womanizer who crosses her path. Kitty hates those traditional types most: the ones who pretend they like women but just want to possess and control them.

Brent’s book is quite funny, which helps to undermine the violence and reinforce Kitty’s worldview. The introduction of a stalker who might be in love with her doesn’t come off as completely believable, but the small joys and puny sorrows of Kitty and her friends’ dating, relating and mating keep the book fresh and lively.

All of these novels toe the line between laughter and moral ambiguity. Their protagonists are not to be emulated, but the rage they entertainingly harness is a reaction to the deluge of lies, insults and punches that men throw at the women closest to them. These books provide both cathartic levity and insight into the fear of being a woman alone in a perilous world.