Second paragraph of third chapter (which I didn't actually reach):
Reena Patai sat alone in the courtyard in the purple shadow of the chestnut tree, and she crossed herself when she heard those words. The voice came to her from nowhere—not from the anemic thoughts of the mad, which continued to chew her hearing with their baffled mutterings though midnight peaked over the dark asylum—and not from the night matron subvocalizing a paperback about a woman’s second chance at love. The voice was Satan’s own.
I got ten pages into this and realised that I would get no further; the writing style is simply awful. I mean, look at the above – "chew her hearing"??? "midnight peaked"??? "subvocalizing a paperback"??? Turns out to be the third of a four-part series, which surely did not help my appreciation. If you want, you can get it here.
Second of three books in a row that I could not finish (and of the three, the one I cast aside most quickly).
This was my top unread book acquired in 2014. (Must have been an electronic freebie of some kind; I'd be worried if I actually paid for it.) Next is Sleepers of Mars, by John Wyndham, of which I have higher hopes.
On the subject of the Sheffield to Stansted via Berlin routing:
A Boeing 737-800 (10 year old short-haul airliner) burns 600 US gallons of fuel per hour (call it 2700 litres), and carries 180 passengers max. It flies at 500 knots (call it 850 km/h). I make that 153,000 passenger-km/27600 litres = 56.7 km/litre/seat.
Let’s round it down to 50 km/l/s, to take into account extra take-off/landing cycles on short-haul (it can actually fly for about 6 hours on a full fuel load but the UK-Berlin flights are less than 2 hours).
Civil aviation costs break down as typically 33% airframe depreciation, 33% maintenance and crew costs (they’re labour intensive) and 33% fuel. So a good rule of thumb is to calculate the fuel burn per passenger on a route and multiply by 3 for the actual price.
Stansted to Berlin (similar to Berlin to Sheffield) is 1130km. Call it 2300km for the round trip. That gives us 42 litres of fuel burned. Fuel is currently on the order of £1/litre at the pump in the UK — with tax, which doesn’t apply to aviation fuel.
So our traveller paid a bit more than the price of fuel for his trip, but although the airline probably made a loss on the ticket by not covering their airframe/payroll costs, they made much less of a loss than if they’d flown with the seat empty (which is why budget airlines almost always fly with every seat full, even if they have to sell the last ticket for £1 — flying a jet on a given segment is a fixed cost, and once they’ve covered it every £1 extra is £1 in profit — or £1 less in loss).
Break-even for that route is probably closer to £90, but I can see how the £42 fare happened.