Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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About pixifer

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I'm an avid reader working on my second official Cannonball. My favorite genres are mystery, horror, fantasy, and SciFi, but I'll read almost anything that won't make me cry. When I'm not reading, I'm probably being held down by cats. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: pixifer's Quick Questions interview.)

pixifer's Reviews:

This time it’s personal (for the characters) in the latest from my most favoritest series

Fortune Funhouse by Jana DeLeon

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Fortune Funhouse is the 19th book in the Miss Fortune series by Jana DeLeon. Fortune Redding is a former CIA operative, now living in the bayou town of Sinful, Louisiana. Her best friends are two Vietnam veterans named Gertie and Ida Belle. Together, they are Swamp Team Three, and they investigate crimes ranging from murder to exploding stills. Fortune is dating Deputy Carter of the Sinful Police. Gertie is looking for a hot date when she isn’t knitting, feeding her pet alligator named Godzilla, or accidentally […]

Spoiler Alert: I’m not the target audience for this book

Spoiler Alert by Olivia Dade

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I don’t read many romance novels, but after reading a few reviews for Spoiler Alert here on Cannonball Read, I just had to give it a go.  April Whittier is a thirty-something geologist in Sacramento who writes Gods of the Gates fan fiction under the name Unapologetic Lavineas Stan. When a picture of her in Lavinia cosplay goes viral on Twitter, Marcus Rupp-Cutter, the actor who plays Aeneas in Gods of the Gates, defends her against internet trolls and asks her on a date. April […]

Light and fluffy cozy mystery about a senior citizen CIA agent saving hippies from the Bulgarian secret police in 1971

The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman

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The Mrs. Pollifax series has become one of my reading comforts. When I’m tired or world-weary, it’s nice to pick up something familiar with a little mystery and adventure, but no real threat of danger, while some nice people make the world a safer place.  The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax is the third in the series, published in 1971. Life is back to normal for Mrs. Pollifax; she’s hosting her garden club for a rare blooming of her night-blooming cereus. Just as she’s thinking her short-lived […]

This mystery might make you cry, not in horror but because you will want the characters to have a happy ending

The Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia

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I decided to read The Bellweather Rhapsody based on jomidi’s Cannonball Read review. I’m a sucker for a locked door mystery, especially when it involves a group of strangers trapped in a remote location with a murderer. Content warning: Suicide, both completed and attempted. The completed suicide is described in a fair amount of detail. Domestic abuse is mentioned.  In 1982, twelve year-old Minnie Graves decides to explore the Bellweather Hotel after her older sister’s wedding. She stumbles upon another new bride moments after she […]

Not as fluffy as the tv show but still a fun ride

Cocaine Blue by Kerry Greenwood

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Needing some light entertainment, I decided to rewatch Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. It’s a delightful show and the rewatch made me curious about the books.  Phryne, carrying the cocktail, decanted it unobtrusively into a potted palm against which she had no personal grudge, and hoped that it would not give her away by dying too rapidly. Content warning: the book, and my review, mention sexual assault.  Cocaine Blues is the first book in the series. Miss Phryne Fisher is a wealthy socialite in 1920s England. […]

A pandemic is no time to read about an epidemic

Polio: An American Story by David Oshinsky

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IT HAS BEEN FIFTY YEARS since Thomas Francis mounted that podium in Ann Arbor and told the world what it so desperately wanted to hear: an effective polio vaccine had finally been produced. For most Americans today, the euphoria, the pure relief that greeted his announcement, is difficult to understand. They were not alive to experience the memories of polio summers before 1955—the images of shut down movie theaters and empty swimming pools, the panicked warnings of parents to their children, the daily counts of […]



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