Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Don’t you hate when a book starts out strong only to disappoint you?

The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

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I so thoroughly enjoyed 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle that I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Stuart Turton’s latest novel, a mystery set aboard a 17th century East Indiaman trade ship sailing from Batavia (now Jakarta) to Amsterdam. Within pages of meeting Sammy Pipps, a detective or “thief-catcher” of Holmesian perception, and his bodyguard/Watson/Boswell Arent Hayes, I was hooked. That’s the difficulty of strong openings: The rest of the novel has to live up to them. Now I’m sadly in the position of […]

Adorable child or annoying brat? You decide!

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley

A Red Herring without Mustard by Alan Bradley

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Someone on the Cannonball Read book chat asked recently for recommendations for when you just can’t focus due to various life stressors. Having gone through a similar phase myself, I recommended cozy mysteries as the genre I find easy to read when I can’t concentrate on much else. I picked up The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie when I was in Pennsylvania on a family emergency, and I decided to go ahead and read the next couple in the series (#2 The Weed […]

The Description Does Not Do It Justice

Wall of Silence by Tracy Buchanan

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I liked this book SO much more than I thought I would. When I first learned of it, possibly here on CBR, and read the description on Amazon, it did not appeal to me. But the book is so much better than the description leads you (or me, at least) to believe. The main character is Melissa, who comes home from work one day to find her 3 children standing by her husband, Patrick, who is lying unconscious on the floor after having been stabbed. […]

Nothing better than reading Agatha Christie on a train!

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

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CBR11bingo: Summer Read I have long been a fan of Agatha Christie. Last year, when I finally got around to reading Murder on the Orient Express, I was surprised to discover that her writing was, perhaps, not as nuanced as I remembered it from when I used to devour her novels in grade school. So I was pleasantly surprised at Death on the Nile; I’d even hazard to say this might be one of Christie’s best. Although I saw the movie many years ago, I […]

An army doctor walks into a bar. . .

A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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CBR11bingo: Classics Have you ever gotten super into a television show in its second or third season, so you went back to watch it from the beginning so you could see what you missed, and then realized, “Huh. If I’d actually tried watching this from the pilot episode, I might not have been so interested”? (I’m looking at you, X-Files.) A Study in Scarlet is sort of like that. Few works of literary fiction have spawned as many retellings, homages, and–dare I say–fantasies (and now […]

“The particular power of the whodunnit” multiplied by 2

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

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CBR11bingo: Cannonballer Says Not long ago I announced that I had “discovered” Anthony Horowitz. What I failed to mention is that what first put him on my radar was a review by badkittyuno of the sensational meta-mystery Magpie Murders. At the time, I noted, “This sounds right up my alley!” and yes, indeed, it was. This is the fourth novel by Horowitz that I’ve read, yet somehow he continues to exceed my expectations. Magpie Murders begins with Susan Ryeland, Head of Fiction at Cloverleaf Books, sitting […]



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