I finished James Valentine's On the Origin of Phyla. I am now incompetent at invertebrate biology at a much higher level.
I don't think it breaks new ground; it's mostly assembling what's known, with a bit of synthesis to close some gaps and hypothesis to fill the rest. He takes the Ecdysozoa/Lophotrocozoa alliances within the protostomes as settled, which was news to me; I thought it was still a bit uncertain. (I was also interested to learn the, presumably well-known, fact one of the ecdysozoan synapomorphies is that they lack cilia, as a consequence of molting.) Apparently, there's still a lot of genetic work to be done sorting out the relationships among the smaller, simpler, wormier phyla, which lack the anatomical and genetic markers of more complex structures that would make their clade positions obvious.
Humans are naturally pretty humanocentric. One of the things that, I think, laymen don't expect is the degree to which human-like creatures--tetrapods and even vertebrates--are completely irrelevant to studying the origin of animal life. Vertebrates don't appear until the Ordovician, nowhere near the metazoan explosion. If you're studying how animals came about, the only things you look at are squishy, small, and wormy.
[Also read: In the Blink of an Eye by Andrew Parker; also concerned with the metazoan explosion, it focuses on a Single Theory (Single Theories are always wrong in biology and softer sciences). But, mostly, I stopped reading it because he regularly used "ancestor" when he meant "descendant". I dunno, maybe Australian usage is different, but holy cow, is it irritating.]
Jeff Lindsay's Darkly Dreaming Dexter: A gimmicky but mostly successful serial killer novel in which the protagonist is a serial killer himself, who by virtue of great discipline, preys only on other serial killers. Lindsay does an entertaining job at creating the voice of a sociopath, even if he gives in to the temptation to make him too human, too sympathetic.
However, I'm a bit cheesed off by the ending, which A) plays a cheap and dirty trick on the reader for a couple of pages and B) leaves a big gap that I don't see how to fill. I have no idea how he got from "The knife began to come down" to the funeral on the next page.
Regardless, it was a perfectly adequate paperback purchase; I won't be buying the sequel in hardback.