John Powers

The TV series "Dark Winds" is a cop show about the Navajo tribal police based on the bestselling novels by Tony Hillerman. The series begins its second season streaming on AMC+ today and then on Sunday on AMC. Our critic-at-large John Powers says that what makes the show work is less its crime story than its memorable characters.

German author Jenny Erpenbeck is one of the most acclaimed writers of the last 25 years. Her new novel "Kairos," just out from New Directions, tells the story of a 19-year-old female student in East Berlin who falls in love with a much older male writer in the run-up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Starring an excellent Shaun Evans, Endeavour is an origin story. It charts the pilgrim's progress of brilliant, headstrong Endeavour Morse as he goes from an idealistic young Oxford cop to the boozing, vaguely misanthropic detective made famous by Thaw.