Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Seven people go for a tour in a mysterious library housing a very rare book, and you can probably guess the rest.

The Library After Dark by Ande Pliego

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Hooo, this was a hot mess. The idea of the library was great, but the execution failed. I feel this book’s existence is a symptom of the pressure on genre authors to publish a book a year. It might have been good if given more time to cook. She had a good story in her first book, and now this one is entirely made up of thriller and mystery cliches, all to the tune of overblown figurative language that makes no sense and does not […]

“The sun is up, the skies are blue, and murder is in the air.”

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

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A few years ago, it felt like everyone and their neighbor were reading The Thursday Murder Club. I was intrigued but hadn’t pulled the proverbial trigger. But here we are and the time has arrived for me to dig in to the story of a group of friends in a retirement village who investigate cold cases for fun, and the new member they invite into their ranks, and the murder that happens that lets them jump into their first in real time crime solving.    This was just the right book to break a two-month reading slump. It […]

Sorority Madness

Finlay Donovan Crosses The Line by Elle Cosimano

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The problem with Vero’s advice not to go looking for chin hairs where there aren’t any is that there’s always a seven foot long chin hair to be found. She’s so young, she’ll learn mwuhahahaha… Also don’t go borrowing trouble is pretty good advice. But trouble is what Finlay Donovan is best at! In this book though, the focus is on intrepid nanny Vero Ruiz. This is the sixth book in the series so it’s not really an ideal place to jump in. But it […]

Murder in a Made-Up State

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

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In Francis Spufford’s imaginative Cahokia Jazz, life in the United States in 1922 is not as we remember it from the history books. The “Cahokia” of the title refers to a state run largely by and for Native Americans, as a partial monarchy informed by Catholic teachings. As a thriving state, Cahokia is attracting more residents from outside the indigenous population, and relations are getting tense. Detective Joe Barrow of the Cahokia P.D. is a man in the middle. A half-Black, half-native orphan from Nebraska, he […]

read while waiting in a queue for a pop-up and the time went by quickly so v much win

The Murder at World's End by Ross Montgomery

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A quick read but at the end of the day never quite felt the sense of “the game is afoot.” Montgomery does a fantastic job of fleshing out a very large cast of characters– I was a bit worried at the outset when they were all being described without names, but as soon as our narrator (Stephen) learns who they are, we very quickly learn who they are as well. But each of their motivations lacks just a touch of depth such that there are […]

“She was a half-wild thing of ink and grass and sea breezes, raised by books and rabbits and fairy lore, and that was all she cared to be.”

The Magician's Daughter by H. G. Parry

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Biddy lives on a small, magically isolated island off the coast of Ireland with her guardian/foster father, Rowan, and his familiar, the rabbit Hutchincroft. No one who doesn’t know that it’s there can find it. While Biddy has no magic of her own, she has grown up with it all around her. Yet magic is fading in the outside world, and far too often, Rowan has to leave Biddy to go to the mainland in bird form to find some small reserves of it. She […]



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