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If you can find it, get
How to Write Best Selling Novels, by Dean Koontz.
It was written quite a few years ago now, so the opening section on the market etc is out of date, but the guts of the book is everything you will ever need to know on narrative hooks, plot, characterisation, use of locations, research, writing techniques, grammar, dialogue, even writing your way out of trouble--a master class by someone who knows what he is talking about.
On the question of the humorous thriller, Koontz has written those, too, and uses one as an example.
In his book he quotes from his own books as examples, because, as he explains, that way he could be quite sure what the author was trying to do, and because he didn't have to muck around getting copyright clearance from other authors.
The essence of the thriller is that the protagonist starts off in some sort of bad trouble; in making efforts to get out of trouble, the protagonist's troubles increase, until at last the issue seems to be resolved, there's light at the end of the tunnel, and finally one last, terrifying calamity which is resolved at the last minute.
An example vivid in my mind is Hammond Innes "The Angry Mountain", written just after WW2, in which the hero, a one-legged former RAF pilot, now a businessmen, goes to Czechoslavakia on a business trip just as the Communists consolidate their hold; and by the time it's over, the ex-pilot is fighting to save his life, and those of others, and escape from the encroaching lava flows from erupting Vesuvius outside Naples.
Innes was stationed at a RAF base close to Vesuvius when it blew up in 1944, and he has moved that eruption to about 1946 or 47 for the purposes of the novel; and bloody hell, you really feel what it's like to be trapped inside a village as walls of slow-moving lava steadily crush it.
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