Cannonball Read 11

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Crime, Boy I Don’t Know

The Galton Case by Ross Macdonald

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CBR11Bingo: I Love This (Not this book specifically, but post-war California noir in general.) For a while I thought The Galton Case might be the realization of my Ideal Novel. I suppose it terribly “male” of me, but there’s nothing I like reading about more than a tough-guy private detective dealing with a rich family full of dark secrets, driving around California and occasionally getting knocked out by street-wise gangsters. Raymond Chandler is the most well-known practitioner of the form, but for my money Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series is every bit as good, with the added bonus that Macdonald […]

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9/12/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:32 |

“Arrange your ideas. Be methodical. Be orderly. There is the secret of success.” – Not Hastings

The Murder on the Links (Hercule Poirot, #2) by Agatha Christie

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Okay, first of all, Hastings is an *idiot*. I don’t think I quite realized that in the other books I’ve read with him in them. He’s supposedly modeled after Watson from the Sherlock Holmes stories, an audience surrogate character, but Watson gets an unfair rap about his bumbling—a side effect of his characterization on film rather than evidence in the canon—whereas Hastings is genuinely a boob, and one that doesn’t realize the extent of his boobitude. In this one, not only does he get everything wrong, hide evidence from Poirot, and bumble about mucking things up, but he also “falls […]

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7/23/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:70 |

“He knew time could heal. But it could also do more damage. A forest fire, spread over time, would consume everything.”

A Trick of the Light (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #7) by Louise Penny

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Clara Morrow has finally been discovered as an artist at the age of fifty. She has her own solo show in a prestigious Montreal art museum, and to celebrate, her friends are throwing her a party in their small village of Three Pines. Everything is going smashingly, until a dead body is discovered in her garden, and it turns out to be her old childhood friend, Lillian, with whom she had a bitter parting as an adult. With yet another dead body in close proximity to these same people (I’m just going with it at this point), Chief Inspector Gamache […]

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4/25/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:45 |

My first cozy mystery.

A Quiet Life in the Country (Lady Hardcastle Mysteries, #1) by T E Kinsey

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Yet another book where I really just want a 3.5 star rating. I liked it more than three stars, but I didn’t like it enough for four. This was a fun, cozy little mystery set in England in 1908. It follows Florence “Flo” Armstrong, our narrator, who is a servant of the Lady Emily Hardcastle, but she and her employer have a singular relationship. They are more like friends than employer and employee, due to events that happened in their mysterious past, a past which is given to us in trickles and drabbles over the course of the book, and […]

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4/10/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:38 |

The first Christie book I haven’t liked.

The Big Four (Hercule Poirot, #5) by Agatha Christie

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At first listening to this audiobook, I was enjoying myself quite a bit. Poirot was there, Hastings was there, back from Brazil, and aren’t we all having a good time now that this mysterious man has shown up in the bedroom, and then expired. Except pretty quickly after that, I realized in fact that the book was not good, and I was not enjoying myself, and even though I did listen to the whole thing in its entirety, I did not *listen* to the book in its entirety. (Quick note: Hugh Fraser remains a great Christie narrator, I always love […]

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1/26/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:14 |

“I’m sorry. I was wrong. I need help. I don’t know.”

Bury Your Dead (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #6) by Louise Penny

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I’m officially hooked on this series. With the exception of books two and three, which I thought were dips in quality, this series just keeps getting better. Part of my enjoyment comes from this being essentially now a serialized story. The first four you could pick up out of order and still get everything out of them that Penny wanted you to. But this one almost entirely depends, narratively and emotionally, on the previous five books, but mostly the fifth. Spoilers for previous books to follow. We ended the last book with Olivier being arrested for the murder of the […]

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1/8/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:5 |

I have now conquered the complete Sherlock Holmes.

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes, #9) by Arthur Conan Doyle

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I’m glad he went for one more round. I liked all of these better than the ones in His Last Bow. Because I’m fast running out of review posting time, I’m copying and pasting all my mini-reviews for this book. I will hopefully put up a real review on Goodreads HERE within the next couple of days, and also a full review of The Complete Sherlock Holmes HERE. I’m not posting it on CBR because I’ve already counted all nine books to my tally this year. – – – December 18, 2018 – 88.0% ““The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

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12/31/2018 's CBR10 Review No:172 |

Detective Novel from Morocco, kind of a mixed bag

Whitefly: A Novel by Abdelilah Hamdouchi

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Whitefly is a short detective novel by Moroccan writer Abdelilah Hamdouchi. Hamdouchi writes crime fiction and has had success as a screen writer of police thrillers. This novel was first published in Arabic in 2000 and translated by Jonathan Smolin in 2016. It is a noir-ish story of bodies washed up on the shore in Tangier. Are the deaths related? And why does one of the bodies have gunshot wounds? Detective Khalid Ibrahim, aka Laafrit, must rely on his instincts and connections both in the police world and on the gritty streets of Tangier to find the gun and piece […]

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12/8/2018 's CBR10 Review No:50 |


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