Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“But there are many fools in the world. One praises God for their existence and keeps out of their way.”

The Man in the Brown Suit (Colonel Race, #1) by Agatha Christie

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This was a fun outlier in Christie’s body of work, though it is actually one of her earliest published books. She doesn’t normally do thrillers or espionage (and when she does it’s often not all that great), or feature one-off main characters, or feature a narrative that has travel and adventure in it, but this book has all of that. It’s also unfortunately one of the more dated of Christie’s works because it takes place outside that domestic sphere her other work is so comfortable […]

“The doom has come upon me.”

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9) by Agatha Christie

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One part of this was uncomfortably dated, but otherwise this was a fun listen. There is somewhat of an epic red herring (I think that’s what we would call it) in this one, and I didn’t see it coming at all. It helps that I really like Emilia Fox as a narrator. The one downside with her is that she flattens out the characters with American accents, but her British characters are superb. An American film star moves into Miss Marple’s neighborhood (in the very […]

Cannonballing with Agatha.

4:50 from Paddington (Miss Marple, #7) by Agatha Christie

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I had a very good time with this one. Especially the beginning and ending. (The middle did get a bit squidgy.) The premise of this one has Miss Marple in it from the beginning, which is always nice, but even when that happens, she still takes a backseat in her own books. This time, it’s because she says she’s too old now to do her own footwork, so she enlists the services of Miss Lucy Eyelesbarrow to help her search for a body. The set […]

“People in the dark are quite different, aren’t they?”

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Once again guessed the murderer by complete accident. I’m the mystery reader equivalent of those characters you often see in farces who are complete idiots (usually lovable) and bumble about doing everything so wrong they come back around and get everything right. I really enjoyed this book, which was apparently Christie’s 50th (although publishers had to count a book of short stories to make this true, and they really wanted to, because publicists never change). It starts out kind of like a game. An ad […]



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