Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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In the Woods by Tana French

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I may have read fewer books this year but made an effort to start reading the ones I own. I owe it to my bookshelves to continue the trend in 2024. Tana French’s In the Woods has been on my shelf for way too long. It lived up to all the expectations from past CBR reviews. And I got to “travel” to Dublin for the CBR15 passport challenge. CBR15 Passport Challenge: Books from different countries (book 1 of 3) The first Dublin Murder Squad novel […]

https://cannonballread.com/2023/12/in-the-woods-teresaelectro/

“The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency.”

In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad #1) by Tana French

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I can see in this book where everything I loved about The Searcher got its start. However, I am not sad to no longer be in the minds’ eye of Detective Rob Ryan. The narration of In the Woods is entirely in first person, he is telling the reader the story as it happened from somewhere in the near future. He opens the book by announcing that he is an unreliable narrator. It is both true and not, depending on how you define that style […]

If the rest of the series is like this one, I just might turn into a mystery fan

In the Woods by Tana French

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Detective Rob Ryan and his partner, detective Cassie Maddox, have picked up a case of solving the seemingly ritualistic murder of a young girl in the woods of a small community. The site of the murder is a much-argued-over piece of land. Some in the community wish to preserve the land as a historical site including the team of archeologists currently completing an excavation. Others want to use the land to build a freeway. Complicating things even further is the fact that Detective Rob Ryan […]

…but the past ain’t through with you.

Broken Harbor (Dublin Murder Squad #4) by Tana French

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Broken Harbor, by Tana French, is not a book. It is a jagged ball of glass that dazzles the eyes but draws blood as deftly as a razor blade. Detectives Mike “Scorcher” Kennedy, lead investigator of the Dublin Murder Squad, and his rookie partner Richie Curran are assigned a high profile murder case. A family of four, including two young children, have been brutally attacked in their home in the housing estate of Brianstown. Swift justice is called for and Kennedy’s close rate is the […]

Remind me that once I was free, once I was cool, once I was me

The Secret Place by Tana French

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This year I decided to go back to some of the series I started but never finished and give them one more try. Series: Dublin Murder Squad. I last read this series in 2013. What I remember about the series prior to this book: I remember being disappointed that the protagonists of In the Woods and The Likeness were absent from the following books. I remember disliking the loose ends in In the Woods and thinking that the setup for The Likeness was beyond ludicrous. […]

“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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