Salvation - Peter F Hamilton. A new series by Hamilton, and a return to form! It's not explicitly stated as a Confederation book, but it does include his ubiquitous wormhole travel a bit in the future. The book has an interesting structure, with the main characters telling stories about their past experiences as they all travel together to investigate a crashed space ship on another planet. We learn about the characters as well as the things that got them where they are. These various background stories are great, including things like a murder investigation that happens in a portal house, where every room's doorway is actually a wormhole to a different location. The living room is in New York, the kid's bedroom in China, the pool is on the moon, the dining room in the Arctic, etc. As well as all these tales of the past, there's also an interspersed storyline that takes place many years in the future, giving hints and ideas of the consequences of the actions that the characters in the present storyline are about to take. It's well written, clever, and sharp, and I'm looking forwards to the next book in the trilogy.
Octavia Gone - Jack McDevitt. Alex Benedict book 8. In this one his returned uncle gets in on the act, having his own space-archaeology adventure. At the same time, Alex himself is trying to solve the mystery of a research station at a black hole where every member of the science team disappeared years before. This was okay if you like the Alex Benedict books, but it's not one of the best, and feels like a by-the-numbers sci-fi archaeological adventure mystery that McDevitt has made his own genre.
Children Of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky. The followup to Children of Time. A spaceship from Kern's World full of humans and the uplifted spiders from the first book is sent out exploring, and finds another terraformed world, this time populated by an almost incomprehensible octopus population who are fighting their own kind and a terror from another world. It's kind of the same story as the first book, just with a new and interesting alien population, and the alien they are up against. Like the first book, it follows both a present story, and a past story of how the previous Earth crew terraformed a planet and ended up creating an intelligent race to populate it.