Lately, my bus route home has been taking me past a motley protest. Come rain or shine, a handful of ragged individuals can be found marching up and down a traffic median strip near Flinders Medical Centre, wearing sandwich boards and hoisting neon placards with phrases like STOP VACCINE GENOCIDE or W.H.O. CHILD DEFILEMENT, etc. Contrails feature somewhere in the mix, too, but the bus always zips by before I can parse the finer details.

On the one hand, I sympathise with these people. The world is terrifying in its opacity. To live one day is to end up with countless more questions than answers. Linking these frayed threads of our understanding into a satisfying knot is as instinctually human as killing something with a stick and sitting by the fire to eat it. But on the other hand, have these people never heard of a freaking library card? Go borrow a stack of mystery novels and scratch your fathoming itch in a way that doesn’t do real damage in the real (and round) world. Try these three recent Australian mystery novels for a start.