I just finished Dead Lines by Greg Bear and was pretty disappointed in it. I've really enjoyed some of this writer's more conventional science fiction stories, but this was an attempt at some kind of supernatural ghost story, and it fell completely flat. Also, the quality of the writing was extremely uneven, as if he wrote parts of it in a hurry. There were chunks of writing that could be excerpted as an example of laughably bad prose, and yet other sections were very good. Kind of a puzzle, but enough of a disappointment to strike Greg Bear off my "willing to read anything by" list. I'll still seek out some of his better-regarded books that I haven't read yet, but I'll be more careful to check reviews first.
I'm now listening to the audiobook of The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice, which is the second Vampire Chronicles book. So far, so good, though it's sort of an odd premise, in which a centuries-old vampire awakes from a long slumber and decides to become a rock star in the 1980s. Rice is a very good writer, though, and the story is very interesting. The first Vampire Chronicles book, Interview With The Vampire, was narrated by Louie but told a lot about Lestat, while this second book is narrated by Lestat, and the Lestat character seems different in the two books... though I think this is intentional.
I'm still reading Mindscan and think it's very good, though it's turned into a sort of sci-fi courtroom drama, an unexpected change of direction.