Tips for Choosing Your Next Book to Read

With all the below zero weather and icy snowiness in New England this time of the year, it's the perfect time to do some  extra reading. 

I just finished A Trick of the Light, by Louise Penny, which was as brilliant as is   the rest of her Inspector Gamache series . In addition to a few business books, I'm also reading The Heist by Daniel Silva . I read one of his other's for a book club and enjoyed it though they take a significant amount of mental concentration. This more so because I'm embarrassingly behind in my European geography. Still, it's a good read. 

 Finding a new novel to read can be a bit of a conundrum . Here's what I'm looking for as I prowl the library or book shop shelves: 
Finding an author whose voice resonates with me.
Finding a story line that really draws me in and keeps me anxious to read the next chapter.Reading a great suspense/mystery/thriller that doesn't contain a lot of extraneous gore/torture/dismemberment (this annoys me so much that I started a club for readers who feel the same ).Investing in a book takes time,  something most of us don't have a lot of. So we're more prone to want something really good instead of just something so-so. 
I appreciate that sites like Amazon and Smashwords allow readers to preview the first few chapters of a book. Wattpad does this too, and in some cases you can get the entire book for free there (my first book,  Epidemic is free in its entirety on Wattpad if you're interested.) 

Posting sample chapters here also helps new readers to see if the book might be a good fit for them. And I finally got around to updating the newest freebie chaps from Subversion (ahem, sorry for the delay), so please check that out if you like spunky female characters + lots of sarcasm.

So, how do you choose a new book/author/series to read? Would love to hear your comments here or via social networking sites.