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Flavor of the month is cinematic police procedurals starring neurodivergent investigators and the British six-episode series set in Yorkshire, Patience, is one of the best. A precarious, self-contained, precocious archivist in the police records department, Patience Evans (stunningly acted by Ella Maisy Purvis), has obsessively turned herself into a consummate amateur crime investigator. When Detective Inspector Bea Metcalf (played with subtlety and flair by Laura Fraser) stumbles upon Patience, a slow burning friendship and professional partnership emerges, punctuated by all the complexities of Patience’s character. An intriguing plot involving drug-induced suicides kicks off Season 1 and two other decent murder puzzles work well. Well paced and directed, splendidly filmed, and backed by decent supporting casts, Patience entertains while adding moving emotional depth.

A thriller about the trials of a gawky, geeky mathematician who might be able to ruin modern cryptography? Bring it on! Prime Target offers a pleasing plot unfurled (perhaps in a slightly leisurely manner) over eight episodes, workmanlike acting (Leo Woodall “works” as the squinty, hapless “genius” maths guy but fails to spark, while the other star, Quintessa Swindell, is sparkier as the super hacker), plenty of touristy eye candy from around the world, and enough plot twists to hold attention. If the music is insipid, if the depiction of the central mathematics ideas is overegged … well, we can’t have everything. Prime Target is “meh” television that plays the role it seeks, and if the central idea holds any appeal to you, I can cautiously recommend it.

A South Korean/American novelist with a poet’s passion for language, R. O. Kwong’s second, slim novel, Exhibit, is a transgressive tale of desire, creativity, and freedom. When a talented young Korean photographer, married to an Argentinian-born film producer, meets a magnetic Korean super ballerina somehow injured, she quickly becomes enraptured, firstly in the field of ambitious ideas, then physically. Overlaying this tableau is the ghostly presence of a long-ago Korean courtesan who might wield a curse. Dealing with sadomasochism and the presence of spirits, and eschewing easy plot progression, the novel stands or falls on the inferiority of the photographer, on the never-ending, inventive lyricism, and on its spotlight on freedom of expression. The net effect for this reader was admiration of the author, gasps of recognition at some of the language, and befuddlement about the climax and themes. Exhibit is bold and baffling.

Books addressing the contribution of humanity’s food systems to the climate crisis have been pouring in over recent years. After reading a few, I grew saturated with information and advice, and began to skip new tomes, but We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, by renowned journalist/author Michael Grunwald, drew me back in. Grunwald has an investigative journalist’s tenacity and thoroughness, and in podcast after podcast, has demonstrated a perceptive bird’s-eye view that appeals to my analytical side. To understand, one must condense and conclude. Anyway, such was my thinking when I commenced this recent book, and from the very first page, it was clear that I had alighted upon a wonderful contribution to Anthropocene understanding. By following a genius climate rationalist, lawyer Tim Searchinger, Grunwald finds the perfect anchor for a depressing tale. The global food system is responsible for about a third of global emissions and no traction at all has occurred in reducing that. The largest impact, it turns out, is due to land use and clearing, with agricultural land ruining the globe. The author pours scorn on biofuels, biomass, and regenerative agriculture (all of them result in more land clearing, at a time when we need to feed evermore people with less land), and charts the wild rise-and-fall market stories of fake meat and lab-cultivated meat. Grunwald finds hope in some high-tech possibilities but none of them cheered me up at all. The author is a feisty, clever stylist and We Are Eating the Earth is a charging bull of a story even as it ultimately depresses. A must-read.

Soon before he died, after a long period of suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Martin Cruz Smith published his final and eleventh mystery starring dogged, brilliant Moscow investigator Arkady Renko, Hotel Ukraine. By now Renko is afflicted with Parkinson’s and in this farewell performance, the brutal hotel room murder of a Russian official sets Renko off on a quixotic, baffling investigation. With his nation having just invaded Ukraine and Putin cracking down on any dissidence, Renko faces obstacles in addition to his illness and the facts of the case, including threats to his journalist wife and his son. Over the years, the author’s plots have grown more epic, in the usual sense of the word (by which I imply, with no real criticism, the plots became less twisty and more confrontational), and his style, never florid, has turned even more spare. The result is a quietly satisfying, fascinating mystery that caps a stellar, forty-four-years-old series.

Journalist and author Sophie Elmhirst stumbled upon an amazing true story largely set in the early 1970s and has turned it into a fascinating book. A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck relates how a “odd couple”—Maurice, the difficult, particular loner and practical, questing Maralyn—decide to abandon their humdrum lives in England and fling their life savings into a small boat they use to sail toward New Zealand. A year in, a dying whale sinks their vessel and they find themselves adrift on a teeny dinghy tethered to a life raft. What ensues is a horrendous, yet (in the hands of such a wonderful writer) rousing ordeal that tests every fiber of their bodies, as well as their relationship. At the time, their story was huge news for a long time, and both Maurice and Maralyn wrote copiously about their lives, so the author’s task does not want for material, rather her achievement in A Marriage at Sea is a stylish, ruminative curation of two lives under stress. This is a page-turning, wise book that will, I suspect, end up in many a Christmas stocking and rightly so.