Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

> FAQ Home
> Tag: Detective Fiction

Creatively murdering people for the money. #CBRBINGO – Dough

The Inugami Curse (Detective Kosuke Kindaichi, #2) by Seishi Yokomizo

by Leave a Comment

These books continue to be really good mysteries, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to give one five stars because they’re so dated. Homophobia in this one in particular is a big issue. Fun fact: Apparently the image on the cover of this edition is fairly pervasive in Japanese culture, the way that Marilyn Monroe standing above the subway grate in her white dress is for Americans. This Seishi Yokomizo guy was KIND OF a big deal. (This book is I think his […]

Page-turner mystery series alert

Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spotswood

by Leave a Comment

Fortune Favors the Dead is the first book in the “Pentecost and Parker” mystery series. If you like a little bit of Sherlock Holmes and a little bit of hard-boiled noir, this could be the series for you! The Pentecost half of the series is the (in)famous NYC private detective, Ms. Pentecost. Ms. Pentecost is a 1940s Sherlock Holmes – she is hyper-observant, obsessive, and perhaps a little uncaring of her crime-solving crew at times. She is more interested in justice than anything else. Even […]

“‘That man’s lying.’ With that, he opened his suitcase and took out a blank telegram. After a few moments, he began to write. KATSUKO DEAD. SEND KINDAICHI.”

The Honjin Murders (Detective Kosuke Kindaichi, #1) by Seishi Yokomizo

by Leave a Comment

A clever, meta little Japanese murder mystery, first published in 1946, by a man who was apparently a huge fan of the western Golden Age mystery. This is the first book in the Kosuke Kindaichi series that he wrote dozens of novels for. Kindaichi-san is very unlike his British counterparts, Poirot, Wimsey, or even Marple. He’s very young, and a bit of a slob, but he has a mind for mysteries. Here, he is brought to the scene of a wedding where the bride and […]

Enjoyable read, in spite of being the weakest in the series

A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz

by 1 Comment

Ever since I discovered Anthony Horowitz in 2019, I’ve been catching up on his previously released novels and eagerly awaiting new ones. I was, therefore, delighted to see A Line to Kill, book #3 in Horowitz’s Hawthorne series, gracing bookstore shelves while I was out Christmas shopping last month. I marched up to my husband and announced, “I’m buying this for my dad, but I would also like to add it to my Christmas list.” Because I have a husband who picks up on these types […]

The weakest one of these in a while.

Kingdom of the Blind (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #14) by Louise Penny

by 4 Comments

Lots of mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand, I really liked the main conceit of the plot, that this old woman makes Gamache, Myrna, and a strange young man named Benedict the liquidators of her will, despite that none of them knew her. The woman, who called herself the Baroness, had a strange and interesting past, and as often happens in these books, a murder occurs. The B-plot of the book follows Cadet Amelia Choquet after she is expelled from the academy […]

Classic Swedish Noir

Martin Beck Book Series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

by 2 Comments

In 1965 writing partners (and partners in real life) Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö embarked on a quest – to write and publish ten novels in ten years featuring Stockholm’s Martin Beck. The novels, police procedurals, were structured as not only mysteries, but reflections and commentary on modern Swedish society. The duo wore alternating chapters – but since I haven’t read any of their individual works I couldn’t;t guess who wrote which chapter in any given novel. The books are cohesive and follow policeman Martin […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo