Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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It’s the biggest and most dangerous dating show in the universe!

Sweep of the Heart by Ilona Andrews

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This is not the place to start The Innkeeper Chronicles, as it’s the sixth installment overall (four full books and a novella come before it). This story has a LOT of callbacks to previous stories, so just start with Clean Sweep if you haven’t tried this yet. Innkeepers Dina DeMille and Sean Evans are still trying to recover from the last cosmic adventure that taxed them when they discover that Wilmos, the aging werewolf who’s pretty much Sean’s surrogate grandfather has been abducted. The traces […]

The Devil’s Details

Hit Man by Lawrence Block

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Read as part of CBR13Bingo: Gateway. This is an excellent introduction to Lawrence Block, one of my favorite writers. Also proved an excellent introduction for me to his Keller series.  I really don’t have the words to describe Lawrence Block. It’s an appreciation for him that has grown as I’ve gotten older and my tastes have evolved. In my 20s, I’d look for the pulpy mystery shlock with exciting hooks. Now that I’m older, I appreciate the mundane nature of life and how fictionally exciting […]

When the only person who knows all the secrets is six

Spy x Family vol 5 by Tatsuya Endo

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Bingo 13: Self Care I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned in previous reviews that I tend to turn to manga and comics for comfort reading. One of my current favorite series is Spy X Family, in which a husband, wife, and daughter are gathered and have to present an ideal picture to the world, but things can get awkward at home since everyone has a major secret: Dad is a spy, Mom’s an assassin, Bond the dog who gets premonitions of the future, and daughter is […]

An assassin is the murder solver; he didn’t do this one

The Perfect Assassin by K. A. Doore

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So imagine that you’re a scholarly sort whose day job is being a historian, but you’ve also just passed your final test to join a professional family for assassins; you’ve done this both to learn but also for the sense of belonging. You’re actually kind of ok with the fact that your society has banned assassination contracts. Except that suddenly people are being murdered, your family will take the fall, unless you solve the murder. You’re probably going to have to kill someone along the […]

Bad Men

Quarry by Max Allan Collins

I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Corrupt Police Squad by Baynard Woods & Brandon Sodeberg

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I read two books over the weekend about bad men. One fiction, one non-fiction. Both good in their own respective ways. Quarry 4 stars This month’s Hard Case Crime tale was one I had actually been avoiding for a while. I find Max Allan Collins to be insufferable. In interviews I’ve read with him, he seems to be the kind of blowhard-ish know-it-all I don’t care for in the crime community. His verbal racism at the Shamus Awards was obnoxious. Really, how hard is it to […]

When you have a soft spot for Russians named Viktor and he still doesn’t save the book

Deadly Class, Volume 1: Regan Youth by Rick Remender

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A joy of being a bookstore employee is that you never know what you might find. Usually I find some gem when they find their way to the cart next to my desk that unfortunately means we were unable to sell it and it is being returned to the publisher. Deadly Class, Volume 1: Regan Youth was not one of those gems. There is no question why Rick Remender’s graphic novel was being returned. The cover was the draw for me so that was not […]



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