Tokyo Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta

Thirteen passengers are stranded at an airport. Tokyo, their destination, is covered in snow and all flights are cancelled. To pass the night they form a huddle by the silent baggage carousels and tell each other stories. Robert De Niro's child, conceived in a Laundromat, masters the transubstantiation of matter and turns it against his enemies; a Ukrainian merchant is led by a wingless bird back to a lost lover; a man who edits other people's memories has to confront his own past; a Chinese youth with amazing luck cuts men's hair and cleans their ears; an entrepreneur risks losing everything in his obsession with a doll; a mute Turkish girl is left all alone in the house of German cartographer. Told by people on a journey, these are stories about lives in transit. Stories from the great cities - New York, Istanbul, Delhi, Lagos, Paris, Buenos Aires - that grow in to a novel about the hopes and dreams and disappointments that connect people everywhere.

Some very strange stories in this collection.  Some were like traditional myths.  A very clever way to present 13 short stories.

Driving Over Lemons by Chris Stewart

  No sooner had Chris Stewart set eyes on El Valero than he handed over a check.  Now all he had to do was explain to Ana, his wife that they were the proud owners of an isolated sheep farm in the Alpujarra Mountains in Southern Spain.  That was the easy part.

Lush with olive, lemon, and almond groves, the farm lacks a few essentials—running water, electricity, an access road.  And then there's the problem of rapacious Pedro Romero, the previous owner who refuses to leave. 

A lovely, fun, feel-good read. 

A Trouble of Fools by Linda Barnes

Carlotta Carlyle doesn't go by the book, which may explain her defection from the Boston Police Department and her subsequent jobs as a cab driver and private investigator. In this first novel of the series, she is approached by an elderly woman who is worried about her missing brother.

Carlotta takes on the case, but comes up with a lot of blind alleys in her search for the missing man.

 A cop turned PI/cab driver. At times it gets a little over the top but I guess it all fits well together for an interesting read.

The Day The World Came To Town by Jim Defede

`The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland' describes what happened when more than 250 aircraft, prohibited from entering U.S. airspace due to the terrorist attacks, were diverted to Canadian airports. Of those, 38 planes bearing 6,595 passengers landed in Gander, Newfoundland, a town with a population of barely 10,000. What happened next goes a very long way to restore the faith in humanity that was shaken by the terrorists. Without exception, the residents of Gander (They call themselves `Newfies') opened their doors to welcome the unexpected refugees and poured out such warmth and compassion that one passenger later remarked, "I was on a flight from London to New York and landed in Heaven."

Schools were closed to provide space for shelters. Residents took the sheets and blankets off their own beds to deliver to the passengers and stayed up all night to feed and welcome then when they finally were able to get off the planes. Locals approached `plane people' in the street and invited them into their homes to shower. Pharmacists made thousands of calls worldwide to verify prescriptions and then filled them for free. Shop owners gave away their stock to those in need and, when they ran out, bought more from the competition and gave that away as well. The events described in this book will make you either proud to be a Canadian or regretful that you aren't.

DeFede skillfully blends the tragic and the comic. One moment Gander's residents are compassionately providing around-the-clock care and companionship to the mother of a missing New York firefighter. Meanwhile, other locals are making honorary Newfoundlanders out of several passengers by means of an age-old ceremony involving kissing a codfish and drinking the local liquor whose name, Screech, is apparently an apt description of its flavour. This book abounds with human interest stories, such as: the fire engine racing to the next town with sirens blaring, to bring back toys for the "plane children"; the animal protection volunteers who crawled into the bellies of the grounded planes to rescue and care for the passengers' pets; the American family returning from Kazakhstan with a newly-adopted daughter; the big party for the four kids with birthdays that week... and many, many more.

There's even a little karma thrown in. When the principal of the Lewisporte Middle School allows a passenger to use their computer center to `run a small business' she doesn't discover until later that the passenger's name was Gordon Conway and the `small business' that he was running out of her school was the Rockefeller Foundation.  Her generosity resulted in a new computer center for her students.

An excellent, feel-good book. I couldn't put it down.

Last Chance Cafe by Linda Lael Miller

Hallie is distressed that her stepfather, savvy police officer Lou, has been murdered, and she doesn't believe it was a simple burglary gone wrong, as claimed by her ex-husband, Joel, the District Attorney. Hallie investigates and finds evidence of a massive drug operation involving high-ranking police officers and her ex-husband. Now in danger, she and her twin daughters leave Phoenix and her restaurant business, and head to parts unknown in Lou's ancient pickup truck. When it breaks down in Primrose Creek, Nevada, Hallie and the girls enter the Last Chance Cafe and find both refuge and Chance Qualtrough. Chance, a rancher who rescues horses, wants to help the family even though he senses that Hallie is running from something. Hallie wants to stay, but she knows that Lou's murderers want her dead.

An entertaining romantic thriller. 

Death Prone by Clare Curzon

When ancient Hadrian Bascombe summons his heirs to his bedside to announce he's bequeathing his vast fortune to just one of them, his malicious intent is to set them at each other's throat. And it worked. Superintendent Mike Yeadings and his Thames Valley coppers now have their hands full investigating this cultured family whose members are meeting untimely deaths. Greed appears to be the primary motive, but in stripping away the various facades, secrets are revealed that turn the tables in bizarre ways. With a stubborn refusal to accept the usual, Yeadings follows an intuitive thread that ends in confrontation with an embittered killer. 

Enjoyable read. I didn't work out who-dunnit. 

Beneath a Darkenning Moon by Keri Arthur

Someone is murdering humans on the Ripple Creek Werewolf Reservation, and the murders are eerily similar to those Chief Ranger Savannah Grant witnessed nearly ten years ago. Having once had the reputation for being the wild sister, it seems her past has come back to haunt her. Worse still, the man sent in to help with the investigation is the one man Savannah had hoped never to see again ? the man who had taken her trust and her heart, and smashed them both. Cade Jones is in Ripple Creek to catch the killer who escaped a decade ago. He doesn't expect to find the woman who nearly caused his death ? a woman who knows far more than she'll ever let on. This time, Cade has every intention of discovering exactly what she does know. Soon it becomes clear that the murders are not random and Savannah finds herself having to trust the one man she'd sworn never to trust again.

Lots of action and hot romance.