Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Sunset Strip

Little Green by Walter Mosley

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One of my all-time favorite movies is Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. Featuring Elliot Gould in a great star turn as Phillip Marlowe who is deposited in the 1970s as a fish-out-of-water cynical private eye, Altman does a fantastic job of contrasting the post-war male angst of the 50s with the post-60s hypershift in American culture. And oh yeah, there’s a mystery to solve. Chronologically, there’s no gap between Little Green and Cinnamon Kiss, Mosley’s previous Easy Rawlins book. The former picks up a few months after where the latter […]

Who started the fire?

Three Perfect Liars by Heidi Perks

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Hailed as a riveting new suspense novel about three ambitious women whose lives are turned upside down in the aftermath of a horrifying fire, which destroys a successful advertising agency and threatens to expose a tangled web of lies.   So says the blurb about this book – and I was intrigued and thought I would enjoy this.  But I had issues with the main characters, and it reminded me very much of Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty, where you are presented with the crime […]

“The whole place had the look of a picked-at-body. But damn! What a beautiful corpse.”

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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This book has received so much hype and lived up to every bit of praise it has received!  Thank you, Cannonballers for putting this on my radar and keeping it there.  I’m almost at a loss to review Gideon the Ninth since so many of y’all have done so already.  Here is a list of things that I enjoyed immensely, in no particular order: 1 – Muir’s word choices.  It’s delightful to be confronted with an unfamiliar word and Muir did it more in this […]

Don’t check into room 712 at the Bellweather Hotel!

Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia

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Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia takes place in a run-down hotel in the Catskills.  It once had its heyday, but now its only big event is hosting a statewide music festival weekend for high school students.  Fifteen years ago, a bride shot her husband and hung herself on their wedding night in  room 712.  This event has haunted the hotel, the young girl who made the tragic discovery, and the concierge.  Fifteen years to the day later, statewide gets turned upside down when a musician […]

Them Kids

Not Long For This World by Gar Anthony Haywood

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Gar Anthony Haywood’s Aaron Gunner series is very good and also a great example of the racism inherent in the publishing industry. I read a lot of books, as my archive on this site can attest to. I’ve read hundreds, maybe thousands of mystery/thriller type books. Admittedly, the vast majority of writers I’ve read are white. I’m not exculpating myself in the problem here. But what does frustrate me, and what I think is worth nothing, is that Haywood’s books are so much better than […]

Christopher Moore is always a good option for alleviating pandemic stress

Shakespeare for Squirrels by Christopher Moore

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Many people have asked recently for reading recommendations for when you are just too stressed or tired to focus well. I’m not a social scientist, but I suspect the pandemic has something to do with the intense fatigue everyone is feeling, even when it comes to indulging in the joy of reading. Fortunately, Christopher Moore continues to write during these gloomy times. While every novel of his isn’t necessarily a winner, you can absolutely count on Moore to provide a pleasant diversion, even if the […]



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