Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Ol’ Hollywood

Windhall by Ava Barry

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Sigh. Why can’t books like this be easier to review? There’s so much to like about Ava Barry’s debut novel Windhall…and so much that grated on my nerves. I really wanted to push this to a charity first-book-4-star review and I just couldn’t. The book kind of feels like the version of the decaying mansion at the center of the story: beautiful and glamorous but uninhabitable and far past its prime. Probably easier with this one to pull out the old good/bad formula: Good: -The book […]

Break on Through to the Other Side

Now You See Her by Linda Howard

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Linda Howard was one of my top go-to romance authors for a long time, but somewhere along my reading journey she fell to the wayside. I was going through my Kindle library and came across Now You See Her which was originally published in 1998. I decided to do a re-read to see if it held up better than some of Howard’s other books like Mr. Perfect, which I used to love but have since come to realize is very problematic. The answer is maybe? Now You See Her […]

Binge

The Blackbird by Richard Stark

Dead Connection by Alafair Burke

The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black

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Anytime I finish a tome (in this case, Don DeLillo’s Underworld), I tend to binge read in order to get back in the swing of things. Here are three books I picked up over the weekend… The Blackbird *** Someone asked on Twitter recently that if you could take three traits from a writer for yourself, what would they be? I should have mentioned Donald Westlake’s amazing versatility. Just consider the Grofield series: first a heist tale, then a locked room mystery, now a spy thriller, […]

A Very Thriller Retelling of Jane Eyre. Recommended for haters of Mr. Rochester. Fans of Bertha Mason might be disappointed.

The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins

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So many 3.5 star books lately, and so hard to decide whether to round up or down. In the end, it was down for this one, because I don’t think, had I not read Jane Eyre, that I would have been very interested in it at all. I think it would have read like just another thriller. But, it was well done, I think. I just have thriller fatigue. And I love Jane Eyre, and while this book shares characters, the characters don’t share motivations, […]

A potential answer to a real-life mystery. YMMV!

The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict

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Overall, I enjoyed this one, but I will admit that I was also disappointed by it. I love Agatha Christie, both as a writer and as a historical figure, and her infamous real life disappearance of course fascinates me (as it has many people before me). She never spoke publicly about the eleven days she was missing afterwards, not even in her autobiography, so it’s a mystery history will never solve. It was extremely intriguing, to say the least, that Marie Benedict wanted to offer […]

“There is always a road back. If we have the courage to look for it, and take it. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I don’t know. I need help. These are the signposts. The cardinal directions.”

A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #12) by Louise Penny

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This is one of my favorites in this series so far, right up there with #5 and #9. It gave me everything that I like about this series with very little of what I don’t. A lot of authors by book twelve are just turning the cogs, phoning it in, and things can get stale. Penny at the very least seems to know how to keep things feeling fresh and new, and yet still give you the comfort of returning to check in with the […]



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