Fearless Fourteen and Plum Lucky by Janet Evanovich

Latest Stephanie Plum book and one of those money-grubbing attempts to capitalize on the paranormal romance kick "between the numbers" novellas that don't have canon weight.

Fourteen is exactly what you think it is – I laughed so hard I nearly made myself backfire at least once, it went by in about three hours, Stephanie never makes any noticeable progress in this whole love-triangle life decisions thing, and the single strand of real interpersonal complication tossed out in the beginning gets all but retconed by a sentence on the last page.

My ratio of delight to exasperation has been tilting bit by bit with each additional book, and I think it will continue to do so as long as we're in this endless holding pattern. It's still pretty comfortably balanced, but that won't last forever.

Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds

Sequel to the impressive but flawed Revelation Space. Another 550 pages of interstellar plotting – one of those rotating POV books tracking multiple factions all located somewhere along the sympathy-repulsion spectrum while they maneuver against each other for advantage while an external danger closes in. The external danger being the Wolves, ancient alien machines whose job it is to prune life from the galaxy for reasons not as evil as you might think.

The best part is still the worldbuilding – war propaganda sent by implanted dream! Alien oceans that imprint neural patterns! Awesome nanotech plague! Oh and the gender politics, by which I mean that there nearly isn't any. Women are just people who do jobs well and poorly, end of sentence, no flourishes, no grandstanding.

His timing has gotten better, but the people are still awfully difficult to really empathize with because they're so impressively and appropriately futurified. And the whole thematic arc is more of a vague gesture.

But still some of the best hard SF I've read this year, for the worldbuilding alone. You have to like hard SF to like this, but if you do, you should.