- Stephanie Erickson - The Cure
This was one of those books where I wonder why I bothered finishing it. Set in a future USA, where the search for a cure for some mysterious disease has taken over society, which is now very repressive and regimented. Every adult has to submit to medical experiments in the hunt for a cure, and the testing and disease kill a large proportion of the population. The main character, teenage Macey, is immature, annoying, and comes across a bit like Kevin the Teenager from Harry Enfield.
- S.L. Grey - Under Ground
When a super flu virus hits the USA, several families head to an secure, self sustaining, underground bunker called The Sanctum, to lock themselves in and wait the virus out in safety and comfort. And then The Sanctum's manager is found dead in a pool of blood, and the residents discover that the manager changed the code to unlock the doors before he died... suddenly, they're stuck underground with no way out, no way to contact the outside world, and with a possible killer amongst them. Does a good job of building up the tension, a very readable book.
- B.A. Paris - Behind Closed Doors
From the outside, Jack and Grace's marriage looks perfect to just about everyone. But it's all a lie - Grace is a prisoner, with Jack managing to manipulate things so that her every attempt to escape is thwarted, and every attempt to tell the authorities is taken as evidence of Grace being delusional or unstable.
Readable enough, although I struggled to believe entirely in it. The ending in particular seemed to hinge on a rather far fetched chain of circumstances.
- Becky Chambers - The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
Science fiction featuring the crew of a tunnelling ship (basically making short cut tunnels through space) on their way to the job of a lifetime. It was okay, lots of thought put into describing a future galactic civilization filled with a variety of aliens (humans being one of the least important species), but it didn't really grab my imagination, and I struggled to care much about what happened to any of the characters.
- Georgette Heyer - The Reluctant Widow
A re-read. Governess Elinor accidentally gets into the wrong carriage after getting off the stagecoach, and finds herself steamrolled into marrying a dying man, and a widow by the next morning.
A generally enjoyable and undemanding read, although one or two bits were a bit jarring. Particularly the fate of the dead husband. He's fatally stabbed in a barroom brawl with his cousin, and this whole episode is treated as little more than an inconvenience. It's all, oh, so you got into a fight in the pub with the cousin you hate, and ended up stabbing him to death? And your beloved brother stood to inherit the cousin's estate? Well, never mind, no need to worry, the magistrates will clearly put this down as an accidental death.... I know things were different in Regency times, but I did wonder if one member of the upper classes stabbing another to death would really have been swept under the carpet as easily as all that.