Intrigue and Enchantment By Miriam R. Kramer What’s next, a plague of locusts? Following a record rainfall and flash floods in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, temperatures and high humidity recently combined to create a heat wave up the East Coast with a real feel of about 110°F in DC and Old Town Alexandria. If the weather keeps you from sunbathing or sitting on a beach, keep blasting that air conditioner while a clutch of novels entertains and relaxes you during your vacation days. You can try an airport read, The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian; a tell-all about sisters and family, Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner; or a majestic piece of historical fiction, The Lost Queen by Signe Pike. The Flight Attendant is a fun airplane diversion: a thriller that I gulped on a recent flight along with my complimentary ginger ale and Cheez-Its. Cassie Boyden, a flight attendant with a layover in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, wakes up with a horrible hangover next to her previous night’s fling, a first-class passenger whose throat has been slit open. Scrambling to remove all traces of herself and make it to her flight to Paris, she tries to piece together a previous evening featuring copious alcohol and several blackout periods. As she flies first to Paris and then JFK in New York, Cassie attempts to reconstruct her night with Alex, a hedge fund manager with a flair for number crunching and an unusual penchant for Russian novels. She vaguely remembers that a so-called female business colleague of his had stopped by the room with a bottle of Stoli, after which she can recall nothing until the moment she woke up with a first-class headache in Alex’s first-class hotel. The Flight Attendant is an enjoyable thriller in which Russian spies, the FBI,…