Midnight at the Blackbird Café by Heather Webber (Kindle): This sweet Southern story was described to me as a nice, heartwarming read, perfect for a Summer quick-read. It begins when Anna Kate is summoned from her med school studies in Boston to a small Alabama town, because if she is to inherit the famed Blackbird Café her Granny Zee left her in her will, she first must run it for two months. Anna Kate has no intentions of being sucked back in to small town life—especially not the small town of Wicklow, with its robust gossip network and magical blackbirds—but, well, you can guess what actually happens in a story like this.

The View Was Exhausting by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta (Kindle): This book was a delightful surprise. I'm so glad I picked it up! Theirs was a fake relationship forged to manipulate optics and better careers: born in London to Indian parents, A-list actress Win Tagore never knows how to describe herself in a way that will satisfy the press. She just knows that as a woman of color, a single mistake could ruin everything she's worked so hard to build. Trust fund kid Leo Milanowski never wants for money or attention, thanks to his hotelier parents. Love isn't on his radar—but he could use a friend. The two strike up a friendship when they're thrown together at a much-photographed gala, and Win's publicist transforms their connection into an on-again, off-again relationship—or at least that's how they engineer things to appear. But when someone starts to develop real feelings, their comfortable arrangement threatens to blow up—in the headlines. 

Hostage by Clare Mackintosh: I heard this discussed in a radio book club program and was interested enough to subsequently read it for myself.

The inaugural non stop flight from London to Sydney is the setting for this non stop thriller. Mina is an experienced air hostess and is to be part of the cabin crew on this historic flight. She notices a few unsettling things before she receives the note that turns her world upside down and gives her the ultimate dilemma.

There were a few parts of the plot where I might have snorted and said, "As if!", but on the whole, I found the pace of the novel gripping.