Miscellaneous light reading

An Australian police procedural, Kittyhawk Down by Garry Disher (not bad, quite decent writing though a bit too serious for my taste, but it's the second installment in a series & I found it almost impossible to get a handle on the characters, it really felt like I was supposed to have read the other one first); and the spectacularly good Peeps, an excellent & original vampire novel by Scott Westerfeld. (Here are some reviews with more details about the book.) I quite like vampire fiction without being obsessed with it (I hear a lot of people say they're fed up with it, but I think that all those years they were reading vampire novels and getting sick of them, I was in grad school with only the occasional serial-killer thriller to relieve the heavy-duty intellectual stuff), but this book's really remarkably good (it would make a great movie, too). Excellent even-numbered chapters with real-life parasite details as well--I think my favorite is wolbachia--clearly I must get the book recommended in the bibliography at the end of the novel, Carl Zimmer's Parasite Rex.