Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“There is always a road back. If we have the courage to look for it, and take it. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I don’t know. I need help. These are the signposts. The cardinal directions.”

A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #12) by Louise Penny

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This is one of my favorites in this series so far, right up there with #5 and #9. It gave me everything that I like about this series with very little of what I don’t. A lot of authors by book twelve are just turning the cogs, phoning it in, and things can get stale. Penny at the very least seems to know how to keep things feeling fresh and new, and yet still give you the comfort of returning to check in with the […]

“You tell your lies and you think nobody knows. But there are two people who know. Yes – two people. One is le bon Dieu – and the other is Hercule Poirot.”

The Mystery of the Blue Train (Hercule Poirot, #6) by Agatha Christie

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This one wasn’t my favorite, though I liked it quite a bit by the end. I had a hard time at first getting a handle on the arc of the story, and Poirot doesn’t come in until about chapter ten, so there are just a bunch of POV characters you’re introduced to before you have any context for why they’re important to the story. I fully realize this is a technique employed by many books I have enjoyed in the past, but there was something […]

“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 […]

Just what I needed to cure the pandemic blues

The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith

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CBR12 BINGO: Book Club Under normal circumstances, I’d be spending a good chunk of my Saturdays volunteering at the zoo. Obviously, that isn’t happening right now, because pandemic. One consequence of that is I haven’t been able to see much of the other volunteers that I frequently spend my Saturdays with, except for a couple of Zoom meetings. I made a casual suggestion that we could form a book club; one person got excited and ran with it, and we ended up with a small […]

Murder she solved

The Skull Beneath the Skin by P.D. James

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The Skull Beneath the Skin is the 3rd and final novel in the brick of a P.D. James compilation I’ve been reading.  Luckily things went out on a high note as this last novel was my favourite of the three.  Unlike the previous two novels (The Black Tower and Death of an Expert Witness), The Skull Beneath the Skin is a Cordelia Gray mystery (the others featured her Scotland Yard detective, Adam Dalgliesh). The mystery in Skull Beneath the Skin kicks off after Cordelia, who […]



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