Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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How He Wins

Texas By The Tail by Jim Thompson

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If you saw the movie Uncut Gems, this book answers the question “What if Uncut Gems but Texas?” It’s wild. The year of Jim Thompson continues with one I’ve wanted to get to for some time. The story is familiar: a perpetual loser looking to make the big score, with an attractive woman on his arm and the bad guys always at his back. The bad guys often carry a sheen of legitimacy, whether it’s oil or land money. This is a recurring theme in Thompson novels, his […]

The Puzzl-iest of Puzzles

The 7.5 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

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The reading experience for this one was something else. In the beginning, I was eagerly tearing the pages, desperate to learn more. From about midway to the 3/4th marker, I got exhausted with the characters and the bottomless plot that was too complex to appreciate. I remembered why I rarely read English countryside mysteries, even books like these that honor them as well as ape them. I just don’t care about puzzle box mysteries that much. But the last 1/4th of this book, when things […]

Angel In Disguise

The Black Angel by Cornell Woolrich

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Welp…you can check Cornell Woolrich’s name off the list of great Golden Age noir writers I have yet to read. It took me way too long. What I found most interesting about The Black Angel was Woolrich’s style. I don’t know what I expected, perhaps something more hardboiled or with a benighted prose. But he doesn’t write like that, at least for this one. Woolrich is a smooth writer, not prone to overwriting or making his characters sound like Oxford-by-Brooklyn the way some of his contemporaries did […]

This One’s For the Girls

Two Girls Down by Louise Luna

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I don’t usually like mystery/thriller books that have to do with the disappearance and/or murder of children. It’s not for any principled reason; these books just usually make me uncomfortable. Perhaps because the trope of the missing/killed kid still fuels the 1980s paranoia about random strangers who just drive around and scoop up children. Or maybe because it’s just tired and exploitative. Either way, Louise Luna’s Two Girls Down, came highly recommended. It helps that it was written by a woman than a man. Not that […]

Guns, Guns, Guns

The Lost Ones by Ace Atkins

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We all knew a That Guy from our younger years. The guy who isn’t necessarily a bad guy but always seems to get caught doing bad things. The guy who never has any luck. The guy who can’t catch a break. Ace Atkins does a great job bringing a That Guy to life in Quinn Colson’s nemesis Donnie, while also revealing a little more of Colson’s back story to see how he nearly became That Guy. The contrast here worked well. I thought Donnie was […]



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