Broken Harbour (or Broken Harbor for us poor, dumb souls in the American Colonies who can't be trusted to figgur out that funny spellin') by Tana French
I stalled out for a month or two on this one with no more than a couple dozen pages left to read, but I eventually finished it off. I quite like the way Ms. French writes her mystery "series" -- linking her books together by setting (the greater Dublin area), theme (murder, of course, and the investigation thereof by various Dublin-based police detectives) and a few peripheral characters, rather than following one character from thrilling case to thrilling case. This one was another solid entry -- and, as always, the protagonist's personal history comes to the fore during the case, making it impossible for the character to not make it into a somewhat personal quest. I'd recommend any of her novels -- certainly the first four, which I've read -- to anyone who likes a good, messy mystery where the case is nonetheless solved by the end (but where not all the endings are exactly happy).
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Red Hill by Jamie McGuire
A mediocre zombie-apocalypse novel by an author who, from what I gather, mostly writes romantic fare (which would explain a lot about the subplots). The basic story itself is okay -- a woman separated from her two daughters tries to keep it together and stay strong for the children she still hopes will find her somehow; a man tries to keep his young daughter safe and find someplace to ride out the end of civilization; a young woman is torn between two men (okay, maybe that part could've been reduced in prominence...) -- but there aren't really any ideas that haven't been done (and done better) by various other movies, books, games and TV shows.
Plus, it wasn't very well proofread: one escape scene had one of the main characters accidentally toss his car keys under the vehicle while trying to make a quick getaway from a small herd of zombies; as he makes to desperately defend himself, one of the compatriots he was leaving behind (with their blessing) started taking out zombies with a hunting rifle, giving this character a little breathing room; so the character, after giving nod of thanks to the rifleman, gets right in the car and zooms off. No mention of hurriedly recovering the keys. X( Also, another character's eyes changed from blue to green in just a couple chapters. Also also, there were quite a few annoying little word errors (I hesitate to call them typos because they seemed to be cases where the writer and/or proofreader(s) and/or editor(s) thought that was how a given word or phrase was spelled). I can't even remember what they were now, but two or three were pretty facepalm-worthy.
10/10 BOTY.
