Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Plot Within A Plot

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

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Imagine being a writing professor at a small community college. Your own novel had meager success but it certainly feels like your chance of fame and fortune are rapidly dwindling.  Enter a young man named Evan.  He doesn’t want or need your help with his writing. He has the best plot, one completely new, one that doesn’t follow a single trope.  You read a few pages and he’s right, it is totally different than anything you’ve ever read, depressingly you wished you had though of the […]

The Craftiest of Pensioners

The Bullet that Missed by Richard Osman

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The Bullet That Missed is the 3rd in the series of the Thursday Murder Club Mysteries. I adore the characters and I can never get enough of them working through their difficult cases that often overlap other cases. This one starts as all the others do. The gang gets together to choose a cold case to hopefully solve when Elizabeth also receives word from a mysterious man telling her that she must kill a retired Russian agent who was once her lover or her best […]

A Whole Cast of Jessica Fletchers

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

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In The Thursday Murder Club a group of retirees gather weekly to solve puzzles and mysteries – courtesy of a friend who has retired from the police force and who has a pile of unsolved cold cases to amuse and intrigue them. The story is told from more than one viewpoint and the reader is given the choice to read between the lines of some accounts, or to consider the reliability of the narrator. The Club soon evolves from being armchair detectives to the real thing […]

Not until I helped kill a man did I realize how complex an act a murder can be

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

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A month or two before, I would have been appalled at the idea of any murder at all. But that Sunday afternoon, as I actually stood watching one, it seemed the easiest thing in the world. ― Donna Tartt, The Secret History “Time, and repeated screenings, have endowed the memory with a menace the original did not possess. -Donna Tartt, The Secret History Based on my experience reading The Goldfinch, I knew that my next Donna Tartt book would be a serious undertaking. After being […]

A nightmare before a 1950s Irish Christmas

Snow by John Banville

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Content note: this review will discuss child sexual abuse, which is central to the plot of the novel as well as to the history of the Catholic Church in Ireland (which is also at the center of the novel). A lady has not been able to catch a damned break so far in 2022, so this is the first moment I’ve had to sit down and write a review, of the most recent book that I’ve finished, and goddamn was it a bleak and tough […]

Poisoning, Police, ex-husbands, oh my (Bingo – Fresh Start)

Catering to Nobody (A Goldy Bear Culinary Mystery, #1) by Diane Mott Davidson

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This was a silly book about silly people and it is exactly what I was looking for. I’ve devoured many a mystery series in my day, and have a strong fondness for small town murder mystery hijinks, as I’m a big fan of TV’s Murder She Wrote and the book series by Lillian Jackson Braun, Rita Mae Brown and Alan Bradley. So, it was this hole I was trying to fill with Diane Mott Davidson so picked up the first of this series, published in […]



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