Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Not a bad cozy mystery

Still Life by Louise Penny

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CBR12 BINGO: No Money! I’ve noticed two trends during the pandemic that are relevant to this category: first, people seem to be taking time to declutter their homes; second, since many Goodwill stores have been closed, free stuff is often just laying about. On one of my many socially distant walks around my neighborhood, I spotted a box of mystery novels that someone was giving away. Not wanting to be greedy, I helped myself only to the first in the series, as it looked like […]

All Manner of Things Will Be Well

Glass Houses (Inspector Gamache #13) by Louise Penny

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There is, at least for me, somewhat of a struggle on deciding how to review a book deep into a series. Glass Houses is Louise Penny’s thirteenth Inspector Gamache book, and as she publishes a new one each year the sixteenth in the series will publish in September. There is so much backstory that feeds each new novel that I can’t rightly tell you to read this one if you haven’t read its predecessors, but I can emphatically tell you that if you like murder […]

Is there anyone NOT reading this series? If so, what is the matter with you??

A Better Man by Louise Penny

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Seriously though, there are enough Cannonballers who are on the Inspector Gamache train, that this should just be required reading. Amirite? [Review is semi-spoilery, depending on where you are in the series] Due to his questionable (yet, effective) methods of cracking a drug ring in the last book, Inspector Gamache found himself stripped of his title as head of the Quebec police department. This book sees him accepting a demotion and returning to his previous role as head of homicide. It’s a decision that is […]

“There is always a road back. If we have the courage to look for it, and take it.”

A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny

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After reading The Long Way Home last year and The Nature of the Beast earlier this year I still wasn’t sure what Louise Penny had remaining up her sleeve for the residents of Three Pines and the remaining members of the Sûreté, but I knew not to worry about it anymore. While those books were heading towards a new direction, this book finally takes sure steps into the new reality these characters are facing. The Nature of the Beast accepted the new status quo, this […]

It feels like an old-fashioned mystery

Still Life by Louise Penny

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I’d seen recommendations for new books by Louise Penny popping up all over the place. I was interested in reading them, but I thought it best that I begin at the beginning. So, I picked up Still Life (2005), the first book in Penny’s prolific Inspector Gamache series. And I found Still Life to be a very pleasant murder mystery. I’d like to read the entire series, but there are so many books, it will take me awhile to get to all of them. An elderly woman is shot […]

“who hurt you once before, so far beyond repair”

The Nature of the Beast (Inspector Gamache #11) by Louise Penny

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This is my first Inspector Gamache book without narrator Ralph Cosham. It took me a bit to get used to hearing Gamache’s voice in my own head without the aid of Cosham, but after ten books Cosham is Gamache’s voice for me and once I got started it all worked itself out. The tenth book, The Long Way Home, was a departure for both Penny and her characters and in some important ways this book is a return to form. We have at the core […]



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