Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Adorable child or annoying brat? You decide!

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag by Alan Bradley

A Red Herring without Mustard by Alan Bradley

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Someone on the Cannonball Read book chat asked recently for recommendations for when you just can’t focus due to various life stressors. Having gone through a similar phase myself, I recommended cozy mysteries as the genre I find easy to read when I can’t concentrate on much else. I picked up The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie when I was in Pennsylvania on a family emergency, and I decided to go ahead and read the next couple in the series (#2 The Weed […]

Reading, Reading, Reading

Broken Places by Tracy Clark

The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie

Solos by Kitty Burns Florey

The Lady Upstairs by Halley Sutton

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Finishing off the year right with another round of great crime fiction… Broken Places 4 stars A really good debut novel that’s pure Chicago without being annoying. A little predictable towards the end but well-written nonetheless. Also, much love for featuring black Roman Catholicism, which is a different expression than the commonly mass produced (re:white) Roman Catholicism of crime novels and movies.   The A.B.C. Murders 4 stars This one was about to highlight why I’m not a big Christie fan, despite usually enjoying her novels. Whereas […]

“Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone can do anything.”

The Searcher by Tana French

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This was slower paced and less twisty-turny than her other books but I loved that about it. I liked her last book, The Witch Elm, but I loved this one. This is also a character study as well as a mystery/crime novel (that isn’t part of her Dublin Murder series), but here the protagonist is a former cop from Chicago who retired and decided to try and find peace in the Irish countryside. He bought a beaten down farmhouse and has spent a lot of […]

Poirot Knows

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

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From time-to-time, I like to read a random Agatha Christie. As perhaps the greatest whodunnit writer of all-time, Christie keeps me sharp as a writer, even if I’m not especially a fan of whodunnits. I grabbed this one randomly from my local library, assuming that at any moment, my state will have a stay-at-home order and I’ll have to hunker down again with books. That hasn’t happened…yet. But when I had space over the weekend to get to this one, I was excited to do […]

Second verse same as the first?

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley

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A group of old friends from college go on vacation together every New Year’s Eve. They tell themselves that after the initial awkwardness of reuniting wears off, they realize how much they still have in common and mean to one another. But not New Year’s Eve 2018. The differences have become more pronounced, and their physical and emotional distance reminds them of long-held grievances and hurt feelings. When one of them is found dead, everyone’s a suspect (okay, maybe not the infant). After loving Lucy […]

Lady Charlotte Holmes investigates closer to home

Murder on Cold Street by Sherry Thomas

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Spoiler warning! This is the fifth book in an ongoing series, and as such, this review may and probably will contain spoilers for earlier books. If you’re not caught up, go start at the beginning, with A Study in Scarlet Women.    Official book description: Inspector Treadles, Charlotte Holmes’s friend and collaborator, has been found locked in a room with two dead men, both of whom worked with his wife at the great manufacturing enterprise she has recently inherited.   Rumours fly. Had Inspector Treadles killed […]



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