Vice withdrawal already? Quit whining. Let’s see the resolution list.

1. Give up junk food.
2. Get more “culture.”
3. Read enough to prevent brain from turning to mush.

Oh, is that all? Problem solved with Out, a Joy Luck Club meets Thelma and Louise thriller with a Dostoevsky touch. Japan’s queen of crime fiction, Natsuo Kirino, has written more than 40 novels, but this is the first to be translated into English. It’s the tale of a group of women who work nights filling containers with rice and deep-fried chicken cutlets at a Tokyo box-lunch factory (the description of which takes care of #1). Though each woman carries a load of baggage (hefty debt, money-guzzling children, useless men), they come together in an eerie way when one strangles her husband.

The seamy cast of night-shifters, loan sharks, card sharks, prostitutes, and pimps gives an uncensored glimpse of contemporary Japanese society (there’s #2), and the twisting, edge-of-the-seat intrigue will keep you reading straight through to the end.

And that, in a resolution hat trick, takes care of #3.

Available online at amazon.com or at your local bookstore.