Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Do not expect the obvious.

Hardly Knew Her by Laura Lippman

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There are some perfectly good and perfectly stories in this collection, and I was ready to give it a lower rating until we returned to some familiar topics and characters toward the end. So the bad first: too many, and there are many here, stories in this collection start with an interesting and engaging set of ideas and plots, and then out of nowhere as soon as the character reaches a kind of impasse, there’s a murder to get them out of it. And so […]

The End/ Beginning of Tess

Hush Hush by Laura Lippman

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Sigh. What a great book this was. I was initially skeptical for how Lippman was doing this (interview style format sprinkled with third person POVs) but it really works. I also liked the conversation around motherhood. A mother killing their child is seen as being a horrific thing with a lot of people not even wanting to get to the point they can understand how that happens. I thought that everything really worked in this one. The characters, the writing, the flow, and even the […]

You’ll be the death of me. Literally and Figuratively.

Another Thing to Fall by Laura Lippman

The Girl in the Green Raincoat by Laura Lippman

The Book Thing by Laura Lippman

Hush Hush by Laura Lippman

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Another Thing to Fall This has the feel of a late int he series kind of mystery novel where some of the magic has disappeared, but there’s still a solid core. We also have the clear idea that the narrative is shiftinaway from the main focus and more toward some of the ancillary characters in the series, particularly Lloyd, new star from No Good Deeds. Tess literally runs aground of a movie set in the middle of the Patapsco river during a rowing set. She […]

It’s a classic example of how corporate accounting works.

No Good Deeds by Laura Lippman

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This is the ninth book of the Tess Monaghan series, and more so than the ones in which she faced certain mortal peril, I find this one super scary. The issue with this is one is not that someone might kill, but that someone with infinite more power than her will use it to destroy her life. This story also focuses heavily on Crowe, Tess’s boyfriend, who is reckoning with his position as more or less well off (not necessarily rich, but with a support […]

His father knew everything, or close enough.

By a Spider's Thread by Laura Lippman

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In this novel we begin with a boy who seems presumably kidnapped going up to a security guard saying that his mom and some man have taken him all across the country indicating some kind of kidnapping. We return to Tess, where she is approached by a conservative Jewish man (who won’t shake her hand) asking her to track down his wife and children. Because they are not divorced, this doesn’t amount to a crime, but is a kind of pre-crime. Tess finds out she’s […]

Their Internet buddy was in serious need of an intervention.

The Last Place by Laura Lippman

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This is by far the most ambitious of the Tess Monaghan books so far, and I think it might be the longest. Tess is hired by a non-profit advocacy group to research homicides around the state looking for police inconsistencies and errors that might have led to unsolved murders. They are especially looking for situations in which domestic violence was ruled out, never considered, or dismissed in order to effect changes to Maryland law. Tess is especially earnest for this work because we start the […]



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