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Top marks for atmospherics to Krissy Kneen, whose “Wintering” is set in the south of Tasmania, near the famed South Coast Walk, and features eerie, foreboding caves. The partner of cave tour guide Jessica disappears from his car one day, leaving Jessica to seek his traces amidst a local community that appears to know more than she does. Alongside the brooding interiors and coastline, everyone seems charged with portent. For some authors, we’d be talking psychological thriller territory here but Kneen is more ambitious, and this is a gothic, literary effort that works well. I felt the structural plot creaked towards the end but enjoyed the read enormously. Recommended.

Chef and food critic turned smallholding farmer in Tasmania and television explorer of farming, meat, and modern agriculture, Matthew Evans could never not have written “On Eating Meat: The Truth About Its Production and the Ethics of Eating It.” This is a dense, sometimes chaotic, but always fascinating and extremely personal look at the worst and best of modern meat production. Evans decries mass-production, “the animal is a production factor only” beef and chicken farming, writes about his love of pigs, and digs into the nuances of ethical meat eating, as he sees it. Evans’s honesty is impressive. He often describes himself as “conflicted” and describes in vivid language the sadness in killing his farm animals for food. Any reader will find plenty to agree with and plenty to rail against; in my case, I question his analysis concluding that veganism kills as much life as meat eating (though he is correct to decry excessive moral absolutism and grandstanding), yet I applaud his “take no prisoners” judgement that feral cats need to be wiped out. In the end, “On Eating Meat” offers no simplistic rules but asks for honest dialogue: “the place and time for this conversation is, rightly, before we go out to eat.” I highly recommend this book to prod such conversation within yourself. For example, I’m a vegetarian to cut carbon footprint, and I’m sure Evans’s chapter questioning my underlying assumption is wrong but he argues well, using evidence, and I’ll be spending time over the next months working through “On Eating Meat” as carefully as I do the major climate change references.

What is the nature of evil? Fussing over that question can seem an impossible quest but genocide and serial killers remain perennial subject of scrutiny for me. The first season of “Mindhunter” offered a unique entry into the latter category of evil, by adapting the same-name true crime tell-all by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, recounting the FBI history of developing serial killer profiling, which I read over two decades ago. Mucking around with the characters a bit, the first TV season was horrifying, troubling, but strangely, effectively informative and revealing. So I approached the second season with trepidation: could it possibly continue the high standard? Well, I can trumpet that the first episode equals or betters its predecessors. Quickly refreshing the plot and re-introducing the core three characters, the intelligent script plunges us into a new, apparently supportive boss and a new horrific crime and, of all things, an in-jail interview of Son of Sam. Moody cinematography, great acting, edgy music, and the promise of more to come … I can’t wait to get to Episode 2!

A brainy, nerdy, free-wheeling private eye who out-Sherlocks the great man himself, what could there not be to like? Joe Ide’s “IQ” burst onto the crime fiction scene like a missile; it was truly one of 2016’s great reads. Follow-up “Righteous” dropped back a notch but was still a work of art. Now the third outing of Isaiah Quintabe, “Wrecked,” finds IQ formally partnered with flamboyant opportunist Dodson, a heartfelt character as memorable as the locally loved detective himself. When Isaiah falls in love with a mysterious young painter whose mother needs tracking down, he finds himself arrayed against a rambunctious, deadly paramilitary gang but also Seb, the man who once killed his brother. Ide writes in fulsome, colorful prose, the LA locales are down and dirty, all the supporting characters breathe as if alive, and the conundrums requiring IQ’s mental prowess are captivating. All up, this ranks as high as the debut and is mandatory 2019 armchair fodder.

Scandi-noir queen Karin Fossum brings familiar Inspector Konrad Sejer to an interview room in “The Whisperer.” There he spends much of the novel probing a dormouse of a woman who has clearly done something bad. Fossum delicately interleaves the charged discussions between cop and prisoner with the recent days of the woman, who had begun receiving threats. The interrogations are nuanced, the daily histories increasingly pregnant with violence. I enjoyed the cat-and-mouse very much, and the author’s masterful withholding of information works a treat, but there is only one problem. The final denouement reveals a tired plot that limps to a boring end. A pity that the technically adept construction is in aid of so little.

Bruce Springsteen has always tested the bounds of his brand of guitar-based singer-songwriter music. On the thirteen songs of “Western Stars,” he upends his normal tropes into a mix of C&W, Americana, and sixties crooning. It can be a shock. The first track, “Hitch Hikin’” begins with a plaintive “thumbs stuck out as I go” and an earworm C&W melody yoked to Bruce’s bruised voice, and all seems normal if muted, so that when the song concludes with a gentle orchestral wash … what the? The next track, “The Wayfarer,” turns on a full symphonic sweep and voice, honeyed up, ignites a memory of Al Martino, yet it is imbued with that Springsteen gravitas that instantly makes it memorable. “There Goes My Miracle” is direct from the Gary Puckett 60s. The title track, an elegy for cowboys, is barely recognisable as the “man who was once the next Dylan,” but it is as sweet as. The aching “Stones in My Mouth” ends with a Springsteen refrain over a long twangy orchestral section that works magnificently well. Overall, it’s an emotionally strong, adept exploration of a new palette.