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Basil is growing thick and leafy in many backyard gardens throughout the U.S. right now, which means many people are thinking about pesto. It's one of the more basic sauces you can make — in addition to basil, all you need is Parmesan or Romano cheese, a little garlic, some extra virgin olive oil and Italian pine nuts.

But if you've looked for them at the grocery store recently, you know those little nuts sport a big price tag. Hungry bugs and warmer temperatures have severely diminished harvests. Now it's not uncommon to see them selling for $60 to $120 a pound.

Julia della Croce, author of Italian Home Cooking, says it's a global problem.

"Even in Italy, where they're also very expensive, they keep them under lock and key in the shops," she says. "So even the Italians can't afford them."

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But here, the power of the passage is ruined by a graceless explication: "Whenever a single entity was paired with its opposite, the value of both became clear from the contrast — and the mutual association enriched the meaning of both." Kirino is a chronic over-explainer, and the constant commentary often mars the dark simplicity of the story.

One chapter ends with, "Saying nothing, she turned and walked out of the room where she worked — the room in which she determined each day which thousand people would die." The next begins with, "It was Izanami's task to select who would die — a thousand people every day." In some myths, repetition can be songlike and beautiful. Think, for instance, of the refrain of the Brothers Grimm: over and over again, Snow White has "skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony." But here, the repetition isn't enchanting — it just feels as though Kirino expects readers to forget the story from one page to the next.

If Kirino understood the value of suggestion, of leaving some things unsaid, The Goddess Chronicle would be all the more powerful.

Local record and book shops have been disappearing as the market for music and literature moves online. In the past few years, there's been a growth in sites that sell fine art on the Internet. On Tuesday, Amazon joined that market. But in this case, many brick and mortar galleries aren't seeing the Internet as a threat.

Modernbook Gallery in San Francisco currently has 11 very large eerie photos of a fair-skinned woman in a white-lace dress donning its walls. In one photo, the woman sits in a chair and feeds milk to a TV. In another, the top half of her head is replaced by a bird cage.

The artist's name is Jamie Baldridge. Gallery manager Danny Sanchez says the work was inspired by Baldridge's childhood and "afternoons reading fairy tales for their dark nature. So you kind of get a little bit of that in his imagery."

It's especially exciting to Sanchez that art collectors are able to look at and buy these creative photos online.

"It'll be another outlet for us to showcase our artists and get that wider range of people who are looking for art that would normally not come across into our building," he says.

And Sanchez was eager to partner with Amazon. "They redefined online shopping, and I think they have the ability to do that for this new kind of marketplace for art," he says.

The audience for visual art is there, says Peter Faricy, vice president of Amazon Marketplace, which is overseeing the launch. Faricy says the company was getting customer requests to put art on Amazon.

"We know our customers love fine art and want ways to discover more of it. And so this really gives them a way to discover artists far beyond their geography," he says.

The new Amazon fine art site includes galleries in New York, Miami, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Canada. Faricy said Amazon's got more than 150 galleries and dealers signed up with work from more than 4,500 artists.

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It's hard to import a European murder mystery without importing baggage along with it — expectations of a gray chill, of relentless and austere severity.

It's not that you won't see any of that in Broadchurch, the eight-part British drama that comes to BBC America beginning Wednesday night. It begins with a body found on a beach at the bottom of a wall of craggy cliffs. There are broken hearts, and there's a kind local cop (Olivia Colman), and there's a shipped-in city cop with a heavy heart and a sharp tongue who doesn't get along with anyone (David Tennant). You'd be forgiven for thinking it was going to be, in short, a drag.

And if it were a simple crime procedural, its close-up handling of such a devastating story might seem exploitative, like just another dead body in another quirky television town. But while there is a mystery here, and while they will solve it in these eight episodes, the solution to the murder mystery is not what the show is really about.

The show is about the town of Broadchurch, where the body is found, and about the way grief is so unwieldy and burdensome that it interrupts and interferes with every other emotion. Trust is upended, old wounds are opened (and others are healed), and relationships are threatened by the deeply human but totally wrongheaded tendency toward trying to negotiate the terms under which others manage pain.

At the center of the show are great performances from Colman and Tennant as Ellie Miller and Alec Hardy, the local cop and her new, grumpy superior who are working together to solve the case. Ellie's family knows the family of the deceased, and she represents what's unavoidably intimate and personal about handling tragedies. Alec is newly promoted and imported, and he's just coming off a case that went poorly, so his investment is just as great in its way, but very different.

Over the course of the story, suspicion will shift over and over before it settles. People will seem one way, then another. The local journalists following the story will seem craven, and then honest, and then desperate. Ellie and Alec are both right sometimes and wrong sometimes, and they will do the wrong thing while trying to do the right thing.

Broadchurch treats tragedy in a community as almost an autoimmune disorder, where beyond the initial loss, the real fight is getting the thing not to turn its passions and defenses against itself. It does feel timely. It's common to talk about series as "timely" when their storylines closely mirror real events or the issues they raise are in direct parallel. But a story about pain not being translated into mistrust and mistreatment is always timely, really.

It's rare that television is this good at presenting flawed humanity as both the greatest and most dangerous element of any social structure. It's a lot more than a murder mystery.

Broadchurch begins Wednesday night at 10 p.m. ET. The first episode is also streaming free, with no commercials, at the BBC America site.