The full cupboard of life by Alexander McCall Smith

Here is the fifth novel in the internationally bestselling No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency hit series. Once again we are transported to Gaborone, capital city of Botswana, and into the world of Mma Ramotswe and her friends.

THE NO. 1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY. FOR ALL CONFIDENTIAL MATTERS AND ENQUIRIES. SATISFACTION GUARANTEED FOR ALL PARTIES. UNDER PERSONAL MANAGEMENT.

Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni are still engaged, but with no immediate plans to get married Mma Ramotswe wonders when a wedding date will be named, but she is anxious to avoid putting pressure on her fiancé. For indeed he has other things on his mind -- particularly a frightening request (involving a parachute jump) made by Mma Potokwani, the persuasive matron of the orphan farm.

Mma Ramotswe herself has weighty matters on her mind. She has been napproached by a wealthy lady to check up on several suitors. Are these men interested in her or just her money? This may be difficult to find out, but it's just the kind of case Mma Ramotswe likes and she is, as we know, a very intuitive lady.

Meanwhile, Mma Makutsi -- plucky assistant detective and deputy manager of the Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors garage -- is moving. Her entrepreneurial venture, the Kalahari Typing School for Men, is thriving and with this new income she has rented two rooms in a house. Her spare time is occupied with planning the move, the décor and her new life in a house with running water all to herself.

In the background of all this is Botswana, a country of empty spaces and echoing skies, a country so beautiful and entrancing that it breaks your heart.

The serial killers club by Jeff Povey

One of those books that you want to stop reading but can't. The plot revolves around a loner Douglas who is not really a serial killer, yet, but he loves the company and camaraderie of the serial killers club, in which he finds himself, and won’t give it up no matter what. As members discuss their latest activities, non-killer Douglas is placed at a disadvantage. The only remedy is to kill off the other Club members as they become suspicious of him, which makes him a serial killer of serial killers.
Most of the attempts at humour are predictable and not really funny, but the story keeps you going. A shame really as I thought the story had good potential.

Echo Park by Michael Connelly

It feels like I have been waiting ages for the latest Harry Bosch book, and it was well worth the wait. Excellent twist though could have spent more time on the justification in my opinion. Also good to see that the great Harry Bosch can get it wrong too ;-)

Transcendent by Stephen Baxter

The 3rd in the Destiny's children series and the 7th Baxter book to date. I am enjoying the way he is weaving the various characters into the different books with such ease.

below a C&P from Wiki.

The story alternates between two timelines: the world of Michael Poole in the year 2047, and that of Alia, a posthuman girl who lives approximately half a million years in the future.

Engineer Michael Poole is recovering from the death of Morag, his pregnant wife. Poole works as a consultant designing space propulsion systems, and dreams of being able to one day explore the stars. However, there are more pressing matters; humanity faces a serious bottleneck, with the Earth reeling from the anthropogenic effects of global warming; automobile production has all but ceased, except for hydrogen-based mass transit, and air travel is limited to the very rich. Due to climate change, the oceans have become dead zones, with rising sea levels and severe weather displacing millions.

While working in Siberia, Michael's son Tom is injured by an explosion of methane gas from previously frozen hydrates, suddenly released from the now-melting tundra. Michael begins to research whether this is an isolated incident or the beginning of something more serious. With the help of an artificial sentience named Gea, he discovers that a potential release of all such frozen greenhouse gasses could destabilize the environment enough to make the Earth untenable for human habitation, in a repeat of the Permian extinction.

Michael consults members of the Poole family, who come together to work on the problem. Tom, John, and the elderly George (star of Coalescent), reunite, and a maverick geoengineering company funds the project. Michael designs a subsurface refrigeration system that could stabilize the frozen hydrates. Meanwhile, Michael continues to be haunted by visions of his dead wife, apparitions he has been seeing his entire life, even before he first met her. He becomes obsessed with discovering the origin of this phenomenon, and his quest for answers drives a wedge between him and his family. Aunt Rosa Poole (from Coalescent), a Catholic priest and ex-member of the Order, helps Michael research the problem, drawing on her vast knowledge, stemming in small part from her relationship with the Coalescent hive and its historical archives. The rest of the Poole family joins the investigation when Morag appears during a trial test of the engineering project. This time, everyone sees Morag, even observing drones recording the event. After the project is bombed by a terrorist group, Morag goes from being an apparition to reincarnating in physical reality. This frightens everyone, even Michael.

500,000 years in the future, the Nord, a generation ship, sails through the galaxy carrying Alia, a young girl, and her family. As part of a government program called the "Redemption", Alia is obligated to witness the life of Michael Poole, from start to finish. Pressured by her family to leave the ship, Alia becomes a candidate for the Transcendence, a collective group of immortal posthumans who are attempting to evolve into a form of godhood, in effect leaving their humanity behind. After travelling the galaxy and observing several posthuman life forms, Alia travels to Earth to meet the Transcendence. Alia learns the Transcendence is attempting to redeem the past suffering of all humans, first by witnessing every single one as Alia witnessed, then by living as every single human and experiencing everything that they experienced. However, since observing is not seen as sufficient for redemption, the Transcendence ultimately desires to erase all suffering in the past, thereby ensuring that every human that could have existed does so. Lastly, if that is seen as too great a task, the Transcendence is prepared to reach back in time and stop humans from ever existing, thereby "erasing" the suffering that they intend to redeem.

Upset about the goals of the Transcendence, Alia makes her way back to the Nord, only to find that it has been attacked in an attempt to get her to go back and face the Transcendence by a group who believes the Redemption is a mistake. Upon returning to the Transcendence, Alia agrees to find a human who can join the Transcendence long enough to debate the Redemption and help them find the best course of action. To do so, Alia projects herself into the past, to the time of Michael Poole. She appears to him as his dead wife, but changes into her true form, that of a small, hairy primate, a form evolved for low gravity environments.

Alia convinces Michael to face the Transcendence. After an initial period of adjustment, Michael makes contact with the Transcendence. Able to see both sides of the argument, Michael forgives the Transcendence for their meddling, but asks that they stop their efforts. Michael is returned to his own time, where he successfully completes the refrigeration project. The Kuiper anomaly, first introduced in Coalescent, disappears, and is revealed to be related to Alia's connection with Michael, having first appeared in the solar system at the time of Michael's birth. In the far future, the Transcendence collapses and the Witnessing program is shut down.

Exultant by Stephen Baxter

Below is a review taken from Wikipedia, as for my impressions, a good read, but sometime the depth of scientific detail spoilt the enjoyment.

Exultant is set in Baxter's "Xelee sequence"
twenty thousand years into the Third Expansion of Mankind, "a titanic project undertaken by a mankind united by the Doctrines forged by Hama Druz after mankind's near extinction." The human-supremacist Interim Coalition of Governance has conquered almost the whole Milky Way — all but the alien Xeelee concentrated at the galactic core around a supermasive black hole called Chandra. The mysterious Xeelee are far more advanced but less numerous than the humans, and the war has been at a stalemate for three millenia even though the entire Coalition has been directed toward the war effort and ten billion humans die at the front every year. In a war fought with faster then light technology (i.e. time travel, each side has foreknowledge of the other's actions and can develop counter-measures to plans before they are made. Pirius is a fighter pilot stationed at the front. When a battle turns to disaster for the Coalition forces, he disobeys suicide orders to stand and fight, choosing instead to risk survival. In a desperate gamble to outrun a pursuing Xeelee, Pirius captures a Xeelee fighter for the first time in history. Returning to base via FTL travel, he arrives two years previous to the battle, when his younger self is still a cadet. Rather than being lauded as a hero, both instances of Pirius are court-martialed for disobeying orders. Commissary Nilis of the Office of Technological Archival and Control, part of the Commission for Historical Truth, defends both the older Pirius (whom he calls "Pirius Blue") and the younger one ("Pirius Red") but loses the trial. Pirius Blue is sent to a penal unit at the front as a foot soldier, and Pirius Red is remanded to the custody of Commissary Nilis, who has plans for the fruits of Pirius Blue's battlefield victory. Using the Xeelee fighter and the innovative tactics that saved Pirius Blue, he starts to plan an unheard of assault on the Xeelee's primary stronghold at Chandra itself.
While Nilis and his new team struggle to confront ossified government and military institutions, they try to understand and to develop new and sometimes alien technologies: FTL computers, a gravastar shield to protect them from FTL foreknowledge, and a black hole gun capable of disrupting a supermaive black hole's event horizon.
Meanwhile, in the course of his new duties to Commissary Nilis, Pirius Red is practically taken on a tour of the solar system and some of the Coalition's most scandalous secrets, rife with references to events from previous books in the Xeelee sequence.
Finally, Pirius Red and Blue are reluctantly reunited for the assault on Chandra that could end the war, but the black hole hasn't given up all its secrets yet.

The Bancroft strategy by Robert Ludlum

If you are a fan of Robert Ludlum then you will not be dissapointed with this book. I certainly was not. Managed to read most of it by going in to work early and stopping off for a long coffee and a read at Schuman's.
I am curious though how this ghost writter is able to write under Roberts name for so long.
When Todd Belknap - a field agent for Consular Operations with a reputation as something of a cowboy - is cut loose from the agency after an operation goes wrong, his best friend and fellow agent is abducted in Lebanon by a vicious militia group. When the government refuses to help, Belknap decides to take matters into his own hands. Meanwhile, hedge fund analyst Andrea Newton gets an unexpected call - she has been left six million dollars by a cousin she's never met. But there's one condition: she must agree to sit on the board of the Newton foundation, a charitable organization run by the family patriarch, Paul Newton. Having never even met the family - her mother was married only briefly and cut all contact many years ago - Andrea is intrigued. But the foundation, supposedly dedicated to doing good deeds, appears less and less benign the more deeply involved she gets... What exactly is their involvement with the 'Genesis' - a mysterious group working to destabilize the geopolitical balance at the risk of millions of lives? As events escalate, Todd and Andrea must form an uneasy alliance if they are to uncover the truth behind 'Genesis' - before it's too late.