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I purchased and read this book because it was the ebook was sale for 99 cents, and the description of the protagonist intrigued me: a woman math professor on the run, who sees patterns and numbers and also knows about poker from her father. I was rather disappointed with the character of Dr. Renee Carter-- she seems like the generic pretty-lady plucky heroine, with a few trappings and comments to remind us she works as a college professor. Dr. Carter accidentally gets in trouble with some bad guys because, in her role as mentor to the campus poker club, she notices a statistical anomaly that would significantly benefit the owners of the website. Because of this, a couple of bad guys come to "take care of" her and the other professors she consulted about the data. When the hit men frame Renee for the murder of the local sheriff, she ends up on the run with the regional detective who was called in, Trent Schaefer. Carter can tell there is something off about Trent (he's a little too good at surviving on the run), something he's not telling her, but she never really does figure it out, and the best that can really be said is that she survives.

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Warning! This book is dangerously engrossing. I started it in the evening, thinking I would just read a few chapters before I went to sleep, and I ended up staying up much later than I intended. (I think the last book I read like that was The Hunger Games...). Helen is a teenager who lives on the island of Nantucket, and she does her best to avoid attention (attracting people's attention actually gives her painful cramps); this is difficult, because she is very tall, quite beautiful, and stronger than a girl her size should be; she is afraid that she might be a freak, but doesn't admit it to herself and does her best to keep others from thinking it. The book begins just as the school year is about to start up again, and the whole island is buzzing with gossip about a new family that has just moved to the island. Helen isn't particularly interested in them, but she has started seeing visions of three bloody women (the Furies, but she doesn't know that), and having strange nightmares that seem a little too real; and the first time she sees some of the Delos boys at school, she launches herself at Lucas with an immediate, irrational hatred and tries to kill him. Eventually, Helen discovers that Lucas and his family are special, and that she is like them--they they call themselves Scions-- and that is really only the beginning of her discoveries. Apparently, the Fates are really into re-runs, and one of their favorites is the Starcrossed Lovers.

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Ajao Bjault and Yoninne Log-Wot are an archeologist and space pilot team form Novamerika doing an initial investigation of the planet Giri, using cameras and microphones and computer technology to learn the language and the culture of the local people, who seem to be primitive miners and farmers. Their companion colony ship is on its way down to join them on the surface, in spite of Ajao's concerns that they don't understand the culture enough, or their strange roads, or a whole class of words... And he turns out to be right, because those words they didn't understand were the ones for the Talent all the mammals on this planet have, in varying degrees: seng (a kind of far-sensing), reng (teleportation), and keng (a kind of remote-killing by jumbling a person's insides). The ferry landing goes drastically wrong, since they underestimated the power and sophistication of the local people, and Ajao and Yoninne are captured and become caught up in the political machinations of the Summer and Winter Kingdoms. Their one initial ally is prince Pelio-- heir to the throne, but himself a "witling", with so little of the Talent that he is considered a cripple, and needs to be attended by his watchbear, Samadhom, for protection from others.

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