Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

What a lovely creature you are.

The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley

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This is a hard book to review or it may be that this is a hard time for me to write a review. I thought that reading would be a refuge for me as we self isolate but concentrating enough to fall into a story hasn’t been easy for me. Oddly, I’m leaning more towards exercise, of all things, stress cleaning, playing Wordscapes and Scrabble on my phone and making meal plans based on the miscellaneous foodstuffs in my house. BUT…if there ever was a story to […]

The Puzzl-iest of Puzzles

The 7.5 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

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The reading experience for this one was something else. In the beginning, I was eagerly tearing the pages, desperate to learn more. From about midway to the 3/4th marker, I got exhausted with the characters and the bottomless plot that was too complex to appreciate. I remembered why I rarely read English countryside mysteries, even books like these that honor them as well as ape them. I just don’t care about puzzle box mysteries that much. But the last 1/4th of this book, when things […]

Steampunk, historical fiction, mystery?

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

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I love steampunk and this cover is as steampunk at they get (plus the hardcover one actually has a cutout on the cover that reveals the watch on the inside page which is a really cool design).  The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley is a delightful read that defies genres.  The book takes place in Victorian London when the Irish Nationalist movement is terrorizing the city.   Bombings at Scotland yard and Victoria station are being investigated.  Could anybody but a master clockworker have […]

A middling Daisy Dalrymple story, but the characters make it worth reading

The Corpse at the Crystal Palace by Carola Dunn

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This review is specifically for The Corpse at the Crystal Palace but I’m including my thoughts on the Daisy Dalrymple series as a whole. The series takes place in England in the 1920s. The main character is Mrs. Daisy Fletcher (née the Honorable Daisy Dalrymple). Daisy is the youngest daughter of an English aristocrat and is married to Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher of the New Scotland Yard. Daisy keeps accidentally finding dead bodies and feels compelled to help Alec with his investigations. She is often […]

Angel In Disguise

The Black Angel by Cornell Woolrich

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Welp…you can check Cornell Woolrich’s name off the list of great Golden Age noir writers I have yet to read. It took me way too long. What I found most interesting about The Black Angel was Woolrich’s style. I don’t know what I expected, perhaps something more hardboiled or with a benighted prose. But he doesn’t write like that, at least for this one. Woolrich is a smooth writer, not prone to overwriting or making his characters sound like Oxford-by-Brooklyn the way some of his contemporaries did […]

This One’s For the Girls

Two Girls Down by Louise Luna

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I don’t usually like mystery/thriller books that have to do with the disappearance and/or murder of children. It’s not for any principled reason; these books just usually make me uncomfortable. Perhaps because the trope of the missing/killed kid still fuels the 1980s paranoia about random strangers who just drive around and scoop up children. Or maybe because it’s just tired and exploitative. Either way, Louise Luna’s Two Girls Down, came highly recommended. It helps that it was written by a woman than a man. Not that […]



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