Cannonball Read 11

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Overblown and underwhelming

The Point of Rescue (The Wrong Mother) by Sophie Hannah

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Normally, when I post a review of Hannah’s books on here and tweet the link, I’ll include her twitter handle. She gives good chat on there and also reads the reviews (she commented on something specific in one of mine, so it’s not like she was just all “oh thanks” about it). I won’t be doing it on this one, because holy fucking shit I thought this book was absolutely terrible. Admittedly, I’ve read the books out of sequence, which doesn’t help matters. I started with book 5 in the series, went back and read books 1 and 2, jumped […]

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2/17/2015 's CBR7 Review No:5 |

Catch yourself on….

In The Morning, I'll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty

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I may have mentioned before that McKinty was something of a wild card discovery. I read the first in the Sean Duffy series, The Cold Cold Ground, purely as there was a gay element to it (shallow, moi?) and very much enjoyed it. So here we are at the third entry into the series, which sees McKinty essentially using the framework of the IRA bombing of the Brighton Tory Party Conference in 1984 to write about something that he is clearly more fascinated with: a locked room mystery. Dermott McCann has escaped from the Maze prison. Duffy was friends with him in […]

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2/17/2015 's CBR7 Review No:4 |

“Bleak” is the mot du jour

Dying Light by Stuart MacBride

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Year of Crime, Book 3 This is the 2nd book in the DS Logan McRae series. The first one I read prior to being a Cannonball Reader, but to summarise, it’s a grim, bleak and cold book set in Aberdeen and dealing with the gruesome murder of children. Fun times. The rest of the series ended up as a Kindle Daily Deal and so here we are. The second book opens with McRae disgraced by a botched operation which ended with a policeman on life support. Assigned to the “Screw Up Squad”, McRae has to work his way back out. […]

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1/25/2015 's CBR7 Review No:3 |

Midsomer Marple gets down with her bad self

Agatha Raisin & The Deadly Dance by M.C. Beaton

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Year of Crime Book 2 So, here we are. 2015 will be the year I finally burn through the rest of the Agatha Raisin books, which have been sitting on my Kindle for a year. The self-imposed Year of Crime (Reading) should sort that right out. And following the entertaining but hugely miscast TV adaptation of the first book, my interest in all things Raisin has been very much renewed. So, after several years of having her retirement disrupted by dead bodies popping up and then solving the murder, Agatha has finally decided to come out of retirement and open […]

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1/25/2015 's CBR7 Review No:2 |

So tap at my window, maybe I might let you in

A Tap on the Window by Linwood Barclay

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Year of Crime Book 1 As we all know, Linwood and I, we go back a bit. Lately, things have been a  little rocky between us, with a duff novel followed up by an absolute rip roaring one. So when it came to this one, I was all “which camp will it fall into?” As it turns out, it fell smack dab between those two stools. Our protagonist hero is Cal Weaver, a private investigator whose life is looking pretty bleak. His marriage is failing following the drug related accidental death of his teenage son. One night, he picks up […]

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1/25/2015 's CBR7 Review No:1 |

Midsomer Marple tries her hand at ghostbusting

Agatha Raisin & The Haunted House by M.C. Beaton

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The other day, I looked at my “Already on the Kindle” shelf over on Goodreads and I thought to myself “you know, I have a LOT of crime books here. Like a LOT”. So I decided, there and then, to make 2015 my Year of Crime. While I’m not going to devote myself solely to reading crime novels, they will make up the majority of my Cannonball 7 input. The plan originally was to end Cannonball 6 with Station Eleven, but it was so good I burned through it in record time and was left with a bit more time than I […]

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12/28/2014 's CBR6 Review No:58 |

Where has everybody gone?

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

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Station Eleven made a lot of noise when it was published earlier this year. It was heaped in critical praise and when it began to be shortlisted for prestigious awards, even more noise was made about how Mandel had written a novel so brilliant it had defied the limitations of its genre. Such hyperbolic waffle tends to make me roll my eyes and end up disappointed (I’m looking at you, Donna Tartt), so I approached Station Eleven with caution. And as any regular reader will know, the caution proved unnecessary as this is one hell of a book. The book opens with a […]

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12/28/2014 's CBR6 Review No:57 |

A highly fascinating and VERY funny journey

Gulp. Adventures On The Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

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Even the most casual and brief visitor to my blog will note that I am not much of a non-fiction reader. But this was greeted with rapture by lots of reviewers and by a couple of people over on here. So when it popped up as a Daily Deal on Kindle, I thought “why not?” and my goodness am I ever glad I did because I LOVED it. Roach clearly has an intense fascination with the human body. She’s published books about dead bodies and copulating bodies (both of which I now plan to read). Gulp takes us inside the body, covering […]

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12/14/2014 's CBR6 Review No:56 |


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