Louis L'Amour, Kilkenny. This man could have taught a master class on how to have a long career as a writer with a highly individual style and yet still have each book feel different from the others. I think I might have enjoyed this one even more if I remembered the first book with the same characters, but even as it was, I found the plot and characters vivid and interesting.
Burt Hirschfeld, The Ewings of Dallas. Okay, okay, I know. But I used to have the book a long time ago, it's true escapist literature (never mind the massive numbers of plot holes and breaks in the time line you could drive a herd of longhorns through), and I admit I enjoyed rereading it.
Hugh Pentecost, Nightmare Time. This one has the distinction of being not only the last in the series, but also the first one I ever read and the one I enjoy the most. Possibly that's from familiarity. But it's also a good plot, uses the secondary characters better than usual, and has less repetitiveness than many of the installments. Overall, though, I'm glad to have come to the end and will not be rereading the series in publication order again (at least, not this close to each other).
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees. This is one that was given to me as a gift (can't remember from whom, though), and is part of the class of 21st-century fiction that I generally don't enjoy. And, to tell the truth, I'm still a bit weirded out by the fact that I did enjoy it. It definitely has some of the same failings that I have noted about other books of similar type - the strange, almost fantastic bits that threaten to ruin the illusion of reality, the almost painful self-awareness of the book that it is "Literature" - I also felt it had good characters, an interesting story, and failed to be pretentious. (The difference between pretentiousness and painful self-awareness is hard to describe, but it's there.) Overall, I quite liked it, and am a bit disturbed by that.
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