Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A little history, a little mystery

A Deadly Penance: A Templar Knight Mystery by Maureen Ash

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The Templar Knight Mysteries are set around 1200 AD in England and feature a sleuth named Bascot de Marins, a Templar Knight who has seen action in the Holy Land, lost an eye, and acquired a mute sidekick named Gianni. I suspect that more of Bascot’s background was revealed in previous mysteries, but the reader can enjoy this one without necessarily going back to read the previous stories. Bascot is 40-ish, still fit, and a man who cares deeply for the less fortunate. He has […]

A Cozy Mystery in a Luxury Retirement Community

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

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I have been on a long streak of not very good books.  Which is why I have not posted a review in ages.  Well, the streak is broken. The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman is a wonderful cozy mystery set in a luxury retirement community.  If his name sounds familiar, that is because Osman is a mainstay on many of the British Comedy Game Shows like Taskmaster and Would I Lie To You.  Lucky for us, it turns out he can write along with […]

Vicious Vixens

The Corpse Wore Pasties by Johnny Porkpie

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Read as part of CBR13Bingo: Shelfie. Posted is a picture of the book with other Hard Case Crime books I collect. This one’s Hard Case Crime book is one that I’ve been meaning to get to for some time. It almost qualified as my “white whale” for bingo but I decided to stick it here instead to show off part of my Hard Case Crime collection. And while I didn’t think it was as good as other HCC tales, I wish the label would put […]

Brutal Indeed

The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny

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Read as part of CBR13Bingo: Book club. I’m part of a mystery readers book club that goes through the Gamache series.  Whoo is the title accurate. Throughout the book, I had a sense of where it was going to go because I’ve read enough of this series and I’m aware of why it is so popular (handsome guy who everyone wishes was their dad blows into charming, rustic village to solve the case) to take the liberty of assumption as I pour through it. But I […]

An excellent, atmospheric Australian mystery and family drama.

The Lost Man by Jane Harper

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This is my favorite of Jane Harper’s four books. The setting is outrageous, and such a good place for something like this to go down, even more so because it’s a real place in the actual world and not, like, an alien planet or something. This is some ‘the year 2133 on Mars’ kind of shit, except it’s now and it’s Australia. I just couldn’t get over how they all live on this giant plot of land as big as my state, and our main […]

There Goes The Neighborhood

Echo Park by Michael Connelly

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Read as part of CBR13Bingo: Cityscape. My cover has a cityscape photo of Los Angeles in the background, with Echo Park presumably in the foreground. As I said in my last review of a Michael Connelly book (City of Bones, which I liked), you know from the start usually whether or not it’s going to be a good Harry Bosch tale. This one was lacking, though it had its moments. A seasoned mystery reader is going to see how a story like this unfolds from […]



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