Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Irish Goodbye

Everybody Dies by Lawrence Block

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When I first read Everybody Dies a few years ago, I found it disappointing. Matt partnering with his gangster friend Mick Ballou sounded like fun but the execution was meh. Block used it as an excuse to kill off a lit of auxiliary characters from previous books, while the killer himself wasn’t especially interesting and I didn’t feel like I understood Ballou’s character more than I already did. So I wasn’t really jazzed to go back to it for my Scudder re-read, which is almost complete. But […]

Follow the nursery rhyme

Keisari Seisoo Palatsissaan (The Emperor Stands in His Palace) (1971) by Eeva Tenhunen

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Bingo square ‘Golden’: A famous author’s literary legacy looms large–and lucrative.  It is criminal that the work of Eeva Tenhunen (1937-2017) is out of print and untranslated. Described in her day (she published her novels between 1964 and 1987) as ‘Finland’s Agatha Christie’, you can see the influence of the English Golden Age of detective fiction: a country house and its rituals, a disruptive outsider, and a seething bubbling crucible of familial and marital tensions, class and political differences, and deep dark secrets. Tenhunen swaps […]

To The Moon

Love You More by Lisa Gardner

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Here’s something funny: as evidenced by a thousand hammy postcards and Live Laugh Love-adjacent signs, Love you to the moon and back is a term of endearment in English. In Dutch, however, if you want to tell someone to fuck off, you tell them to walk to the moon. I’m not sure what that says about us as a people, but I was reminded of the duality by Gardner’s Love You More. Not because it involves either linguistics of astronomy, but because there’s an inherent […]

Shoulder pads and shootouts

G is for Gumshoe (1990) by Sue Grafton

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CBR Bingo Square: Relation”ship” (Fiercely independent PI Kinsey Millhone has to allow fiercely protective PI Robert Dietz be her bodyguard) I read a bunch of the ‘Alphabet Mystery’ series in my teens, when there was somehow time to read everything, and I would stock up on library books rather than booze for staying up all night on New Year’s Eve. They star, and are usually narrated by, Private Investigator Kinsey Millhone, a young-ish woman in California. She and Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski (1982-2022) were probably […]

War Without End

The Border by Don Winslow

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Someone I follow on Instagram did a “What are you reading this weekend?” post. I responded with this book. The person replied: “I’ve never read Don Winslow but I’ve heard good things.” Hmm. On the one hand, Winslow is one of my favorite, reliable writers. He churns out some incredible crime fiction, including epic historical crime fiction that integrates real events into the narrative. I’m reading what he’s writing. On the other hand, Winslow’s art is hard to separate from the artist, especially when he […]

It’s Writing By Numbers but at Least the Painting is Good

The Outsider by Alex Finlay

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Grayson ‘Gray’ Hernandez has just finished law school. He dreams of making a big splash as a hot-shot lawyer, but so far his career hasn’t really taken off yet. Forever the idealist – his immigrant parents run a pizza place in a bad neighbourhood, and Gray wants to help them – he takes up a job as a Supreme Court messenger. It doesn’t pay much but at least he gets to be around the most brilliant minds of the country. Then, one night, the Chief […]



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