Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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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 […]

Steampunk, historical fiction, mystery?

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

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I love steampunk and this cover is as steampunk at they get (plus the hardcover one actually has a cutout on the cover that reveals the watch on the inside page which is a really cool design).  The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley is a delightful read that defies genres.  The book takes place in Victorian London when the Irish Nationalist movement is terrorizing the city.   Bombings at Scotland yard and Victoria station are being investigated.  Could anybody but a master clockworker have […]

A middling Daisy Dalrymple story, but the characters make it worth reading

The Corpse at the Crystal Palace by Carola Dunn

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This review is specifically for The Corpse at the Crystal Palace but I’m including my thoughts on the Daisy Dalrymple series as a whole. The series takes place in England in the 1920s. The main character is Mrs. Daisy Fletcher (née the Honorable Daisy Dalrymple). Daisy is the youngest daughter of an English aristocrat and is married to Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher of the New Scotland Yard. Daisy keeps accidentally finding dead bodies and feels compelled to help Alec with his investigations. She is often […]

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 […]

Historical cozy mystery set in a manor house with spies and ghosts

A House of Ghosts by W.C. Ryan

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It’s 1917 England and Kate Cartwright works in intelligence. Her boss, simply known as C, instructs her to attend a house party at Blackwater Abbey and to take her fiancé with her. Two problems: Kate has already declined the invitation to the house party, and she broke off her engagement. C tells her too bad, her presence at Blackwater Abbey is a matter of national security. Top-secret weapons plans from England have been discovered in Berlin, and C has heard that the traitor or traitors […]



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