Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

The Movie Was Better

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

by Leave a Comment

So this book was okay, but the ending was a letdown especially since when you think about things in a logical way you realize that what was really going on was pretty dumb. The book drags a lot too. The movie managed to move things along quickly with a lot of great imagery. Lehane in this book though makes you go over and over things and you quickly get tired of the investigation. It’s not until the final reveal of things that the book gets […]

A Character Study in a Suspense Novel

Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane

by 1 Comment

I quite enjoy Dennis Lehane’s novel; I love The Given Day, quite like his Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro mysteries, and think Mystic River was amazingly written.  He doesn’t just write good mysteries, I also enjoy the writing itself. The novel begins with a prologue which reveals to the reader that when Rachel is 35, she kills her husband by shooting him.  The novel then goes back in time and slowly shows the reader how Rachel got to that day in her life, and what […]

Down the Rabbit Hole

Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane

by Leave a Comment

I fell for you because that’s what you do when you meet the woman whose face you want to be looking into when you die. You fall. And keep falling. And if you’re really lucky, she falls with you and then you never get back up again to where you were because if that was so great, you wouldn’t have needed to fall in the first place. Rachel Childs has not had the best childhood. Her mother was a famed psychologist and writer of self-help […]

The story of the Coughlin family begun in The Given Day continues …

by 1 Comment

Live by Night is a crime saga focused on the characters, portraying them as more than one dimensional thugs. Most of them do what they do for a reason. Taking place in 1927, 8 years after the Boston Police strike, Live By Night shifts focus from Danny Coughlin to his youngest brother, Joe. Now 20 and an accomplished small time criminal, Joe falls for the wrong woman and it changes the trajectory of his life. Along the way he rubs elbows with real and fictional […]

“They never see you coming, do they?”

by Leave a Comment

Bob and Cousin Marv run a bar on the south side of Boston. Despite being called “Cousin Marv’s” it’s actually owned by the local Chechen gangsters. Because of this it’s used as a secure drop point for various bookmaking money in town so that the gangsters can collect it later. One night a couple of robbers stick up the bar for $5000 and the Chechens do not react well to this event. Bob inadvertently complicates the matter by giving the investigating cop, Detective Torres, a […]

Dennis Lehane Makes a Money Grab Like a Chechan Mobster

by 2 Comments

  I have always loved Dennis Lehane. He’s one of my absolute favorite writers, so when my library had a book of his on the “New” shelf, I grabbed it thinking it was odd that I hadn’t read it before.  Immediately as I started reading, I realized that I saw a movie trailer for this but then never heard anything about it again…The book isn’t bad, you can tell it’s by Lehane, it has his tempo, his lingo and of course, Boston as the ever […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo