Cannonball Read 12

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Devil’s Night

Blood Sugar by Daniel Kraus

The Crow by James O'Barr

The Transgressors by Jim Thompson

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Happy Halloween! Preceding this Devil’s Night, I had a full day off and caught up on a lot of reading. It was a relief to get these three off the TBR list. All were good in their own respective ways. Blood Sugar 3 stars “A” for effort on the language, which is written in the slang of what Daniel Kraus thinks is a modern day teenager. I found it too distracting. But much like Nico Walker’s Cherry, when I was able to get used to it, […]

Big, stinky dog living under porch with a suitcase full of $400k and explosives.

The Drifter (Peter Ash, #1) by Nicholas Petrie

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This book was a gift I got from the CBR Book Exchange a couple years ago (thanks again, Jenny S!), and I just never got around to reading it because crime thrillers with hyper-masculine main characters and lots of shoot-’em up violence aren’t really my thing. I’m glad I gave it a shot, because although this book fits comfortably in that genre, I found the lead character Peter Ash, a veteran of the US Marine Corps, to be sensitively portrayed, and the plot itself had […]

Best Buds

A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself by William Boyle

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My William Boyle journey has been an interesting one. I’ve tried to read Gravesend three separate times with no success. They have the feel of those George Pelecanos style character-driven crime tales that I feel like I should enjoy more than I do, in part because the writer is too close to their home territory to let the story breathe. At the beginning of the pandemic, I finally sat down and finished The Lonely Witness, which I found to be fine but lacking, aside from a great protagonist. […]

Bushwick-ed

The Nightworkers by Brian Selfon

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I was really impressed with large parts of first time writer Brian Selfon’s The Nightworkers. His characterization was of the highest quality. I found myself intrigued with most of the individual plot lines. His descriptions of Bushwick, a neighborhood I’m only somewhat familiar with, made it come to life. I always enjoy a good New York City crime tale set outside of Manhattan, if done right (thinking in this moment of William Boyle and Maggie Estep). And his use of dialogue, no doubt stemming from his days […]

“You’ll light your own bloody self on fire if you have to. And then you can pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you knew it all along. Congratulations.”

The Trespassser (Dublin Murder Squad, #6) by Tana French

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Short review for a book that has too much to talk about for me without writing a dissertation. I just find Antoinette Conway to be such an interesting narrator, and I love the way French plays off Conway’s weaknesses with the murder of Aislinn Murray. I had actually forgotten almost everything about this book, except how thorny Conway was as a narrator, and how her paranoia SPOILERS ended up being mostly unjustified END SPOILERS. I had also forgotten how angry Conway made me in her […]



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