Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Murder of the Week

A Twist of a Knife by Anthony Horowitz

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I was a touch disappointed in Anthony Horowitz’s last Hawthorne mystery, so I started The Twist of a Knife with my expectations tempered. I love Horowitz’s two Atticus Pünd novels (Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders), and I suspect I’ve been judging the Hawthorne series a little too harshly because of that. I still enjoy them, though, for what they are: light-hearted, fun mysteries that read like episodes of your favorite murder-of-the-week television series. The Twist of the Knife is an entertaining installment. When the novel […]

Okay now this is a twist!

The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill

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Okay. Let me see if I can accurately summarize this book. The Woman in the Library is a book by Sulari Gentill about an author named Hannah Tigone who is writing a new mystery novel. Hannah sends each of the chapters she writes to a penpal named Leo for feedback. Each chapter of The Woman in the Library is a fictional chapter in Hannah’s book followed by feedback and notes from Leo. The fictional book that Hannah is writing is about an author who was awarded a […]

this book has been kicking around for 30ish years and I just picked it up NOW?!

Possession by A.S. Byatt

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…and it’s been sitting in my own collection for a good decade or so? How did I keep stepping around this one? This book was written for me- or at least the me of ten years ago. DEFINITLEY the me of twenty years ago. 14-year-old-me would have swooned myself into an early grave with this one! A youngish academic is sinking further and further into classic British gloom. He’s in a dead relationship, putting in time in a dead-end job, researching crumbs on a long-dead […]

This book is like a golden poppy growing from the manure of the last 12 months. Its existence makes me smile.

Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz

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I was surprised when I heard that Anthony Horowitz was releasing a sequel to Magpie Murders, one of the most delightful books I read in 2019. That mystery-within-a-mystery was clever, well-constructed, and utterly entertaining, but how could Horowitz plausibly make that format work again using the same characters? To my tremendous joy, Horowitz has constructed an equally triumphant (maybe even better?) sequel. At the start of Moonflower Murders, former publisher Susan Ryeland is living in Crete, trying to succeed in the boutique hotel business along […]

It turns out that sometimes having a background in English literature pays off

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry

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Official book description: For his entire life, Charley Sutherland has concealed a magical ability he can’t quite control: he can bring characters from books into the real world. His older brother, Rob – a young lawyer with an utterly normal life – hopes that this strange family secret will disappear with disuse, and he will be discharged from his duty of protecting Charley and the real world from each other.   But then, literary characters start causing trouble in their city, making threats about destroying […]

The fridged women speak.

The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente

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The Refrigerator Monologues is a feminist response to the way women are treated in superhero comics. It’s a short read, a novella really, at only 147 pages, but it packs a punch. Riffing on both the stage play The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler, and Gail Simone’s website Women in Refrigerators (which coined the term “fridging” for any female character who dies in order to further the plotline or character arc of a man), Valente’s book features six women whose lives were reduced to subplots […]



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