Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


The future is an intricately beautiful machine

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

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CBR13bingo: Machinery Thaniel works as a telegraphist for the Home Office, a master of the machine.  He’d rather be playing the piano, but his civil service salary allows him to support his widowed sister and nephews and pays the rent for his sad little room in a boarding house on the bank of the Thames. Mori made the exquisitely beautiful watch that was left on Thaniel’s bed in a velvet box.  The watch that saved Thaniel’s life, and brought both of them under suspicion of […]

Double Cannonballing with a good series-ender.

Subtle Blood (The Will Darling Adventures, #3) by K.J. Charles

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**30 Books in 30 Days** Book 23/30 To be honest, I think if (when) I read all three books in this series back to back in the future, I will bump up both books two and three from four to five stars. It has been top notch in all areas: romance, class examinations, mysteries, historical fiction set in the 1920s, books about friendship, books about secret agents and spies, suspense novels. Seriously, just in all the things this series sets out to do, it succeeds […]

Not her best work, in my opinion.

Parker Pyne Investigates by Agatha Christie

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**30 Books in 30 Days** Book 24/30 This review is going to be on the shorter side, because I don’t think I have much to say about this one. Mostly, it just wasn’t what I was expecting! Firstly, this is a short story collection, not a novel (like I thought). Parker Pyne is indeed an investigator of sorts, but not one like Hercule Poirot (like I thought), but one like I’ve never seen before. So, props to good old Agatha on that one for originality, […]

The Horrors of Replacement Theory Conspiracists

Weeping Waters by Karin Brynard

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Some have pegged Karin Brynard as the “South African Stieg Larsson.” For good and not so good reasons, I can see why. I’m not an expert on South Africa. I know the broad strokes of the fall of apartheid and how it functioned before the rise of President Mandela, but as far as how the country is adapting today, I’m mostly clueless. I have no doubt that a herrenvolk government doesn’t just switch to multicultural democracy overnight, and that South Africans are probably several generations […]

“Somewhere, beneath the howl of the wind and the groan of the trees, Falk thought he could almost hear a death knell toll.” #CBRBINGO – The Wilds

Force of Nature (Aaron Falk, #2) by Jane Harper

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**30 Books in 30 Days** Book 16/30 This is the third book I’ve read by Jane Harper, Australian mystery and crime writer, and she is turning out to be an incredibly consistent storyteller. I didn’t find this as personally engaging as The Dry, I’m pretty sure because this one (which also features Aaron Falk) didn’t have as personal of stakes, but it was still super solid. A creepy almost survivalist mystery, set in the Australian bush, a little unique because for most of the novel […]

“All I wanted to do was watch media and not exist.”

Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries, #6) by Martha Wells

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**30 Books in 30 Days** Book 13/30 I love Murderbot and I hope that I always will. What I love about these stories, beyond the immediate appeal of an outwardly misanthropic and antisocial being fighting its own feelings and personhood, is that as they go on, Wells seems to be showing that Murderbot is not just a one story kind of murder-construct (aka not that at all), but one that can play around in different genres. No one will convince me that the full-length novel […]



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