Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Remembrances of Days Past

The Forsaken by Ace Atkins

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I’ve discovered the pattern in Ace Atkins’ Quinn Colson series, this being book four: person from the past comes back to Tibbehah County, a lot of staring and some incidents happen and then it all leads up to a big bang. If these books weren’t so well-written, I’d probably be done with them but Ace Atkins keeps finding ways to make his world an interesting and readable one. It helps that Quinn Colson, while being a tough guy Army Ranger sheriff, is also allowed to […]

Pulp Fiction

The Serialist by David Gordon

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Back in the day, I’m talking the 20s-50s, writers used to make their bread by writing pulp tales on the side while working on their main works. They would release the former under pseudonyms. Hard boiled mysteries, campy science fiction, erotica, plenty of great writers plied their trade this way. Lawrence Block wrote dozens of trashy erotic novels under a variety of names before transitioning to mainstream mystery fare. The Serialist is a tribute to that form of writing and for that, I almost love the […]

Quarantine Reading

Conviction by Denise Mina

Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death by Donald Westlake

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Been doing a lot of reading to pass the time during the quarantine. I finished these two books back to back, both were good in their own respective ways. So here are the reviews… Conviction I didn’t mean for this to be my first Denise Mina book. I’ve tried and failed twice to get into Garenthill. But the premise seemed too good to pass up and I thought it would be a fun pleasure read. It starts off rocky. The main character, whose perspective we get first […]

The Description Does Not Do It Justice

Wall of Silence by Tracy Buchanan

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I liked this book SO much more than I thought I would. When I first learned of it, possibly here on CBR, and read the description on Amazon, it did not appeal to me. But the book is so much better than the description leads you (or me, at least) to believe. The main character is Melissa, who comes home from work one day to find her 3 children standing by her husband, Patrick, who is lying unconscious on the floor after having been stabbed. […]

The Killers

All The Flowers Are Dying by Lawrence Block

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I really do truly love this series. I didn’t expect to tear through it as fast as I did and now I’ve only got a few to read. Stupid pandemic. I’m also glad I read this series when I did. Had I gone through it in my early-20s, when I read my first Scudder, I don’t think I would have appreciated the solemn nature of Block’s famous detective, nor the shoe leather detective work he is known for. This is in many ways the last […]

Storms A Comin’

The Broken Places by Ace Atkins

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For a long time, I was wary of starting Ace Atkins’ Quinn Colson series. I’m not from the south but my dad is and I used to vacation there a lot. I know how often southern folk are caricaturized. I also know how people will write off the south’s racist legacy in favor of being “complex” (looking at you Gregory Iles, although I’ve never made it past 20 pages of a Penn Cage book so maybe he gets better). I assumed Quinn Colson, ex-Army Ranger, […]



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