Great North Road (Peter Hamilton)

This one was overambitious of me. I think it is a good story, with lots of intriguing sense-of-wonder science fiction stuff layered over a gritty police procedural dealing with a very odd murder - but it's almost 1000 pages and I just couldn't pull it off. I ran out of energy and time less than a third of the way through, and moved onto another. I could argue that it failed to grab me sufficiently, but in all honesty, I think it was a failure of my patience, not a failure of the book. Sorry.

Odds Against Tomorrow (Nathaniel Rich)

This is an odd story, but engrossing. Mitchell has always been fascinated with disasters, carrying a card with him listing the probabilities of dying in various odd ways, and this leads him into a career calculating risk for a financial institution, but he feels that he is not getting anywhere in his job and his personal life is essentially nonexistent. He jumps to join a brand new company that helps corporations prepare for disaster, and his obsessions spiral almost out of control as he spins worst-case scenarios for clients about everything from terrorist attack to the Second Coming. When a superstorm targets Manhattan, he is hailed as a prophet who foresaw the disaster, but the reality of his fears is nearly overwhelming. Intertwined with his psychological apocalypse is an unexpected connection with a woman he spoke to once in college, who addresses her own worst-case scenario in a very different way. I was definitely interested and wanted to find out what happened next, even though Mitchell's twisted psyche was always just a touch too over the top for me to really identify with him.