Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Turning on a Dirt Road

The Ranger by Ace Atkins

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It’s a good thing The Ranger was my first Ace Atkins novel. He’s written plenty of southern-friend country crime tales and with this one, I find a writer who has developed a style that works. I was weary of these books in the same way I’m reflexively weary of most male lone-wolf time crime tales: they often produce the same cocktail of toxic masculinity, gross misogyny, class and race caricaturization and a big bang shootout to end it all. The Ranger has a big bang shootout to end […]

A theater for my unquiet mind

The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn

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My mother is a reader but unfortunately it is rare for us to share a book that we both enjoy. Occasionally though, we hit upon one that pleases us both. She tends to think that the books that I read are “weird” so she didn’t hesitate to recommend this one to me. After reading loads of similar sounding books and suffering from Gone Girl burnout, I was wary. I have a love/hate thing with books that I KNOW have some kind of twist and/or unreliable narrators that […]

All Manner of Things Will Be Well

Glass Houses (Inspector Gamache #13) by Louise Penny

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There is, at least for me, somewhat of a struggle on deciding how to review a book deep into a series. Glass Houses is Louise Penny’s thirteenth Inspector Gamache book, and as she publishes a new one each year the sixteenth in the series will publish in September. There is so much backstory that feeds each new novel that I can’t rightly tell you to read this one if you haven’t read its predecessors, but I can emphatically tell you that if you like murder […]

Ghostbuster

Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke

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On the surface, Attica Locke is not reinventing the proverbial cop mystery wheel with her Highway 59 series. Her protagonist is a lone wolf who drinks too much, meddles in other affairs, has woman and family troubles, doesn’t get along with the brass, plays by his own rules, and is a byproduct of the local culture, which he simultaneously loves and loathes. The difference between these and most other white-written bestselling cliched mystery series is that main character Texas Ranger Darren Matthews is black, and […]

End of the Road

The Right Madness by James Crumley

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And so I finish the great road trip that is James Crumley’s mystery novel series featuring private eyes Milo Milodragovitch and CW Sughrue. While I didn’t like them as much as their most ardent fans do, I enjoyed my time going through all seven. Apparently, it took a lot of prodding for Crumley to write this one. He wasn’t sure if he was going to do another after 2001’s The Final Country, which for my money is his best book and a tribute to Texas. I […]

What really happens in the jury room?

The Holdout by Graham Moore

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What happens when a young black teacher is on trial for the murder of a wealthy LA businessman’s daughter (who was his student) and there isn’t a body?  You end up with a very long, very publicized trial, and a jury who can’t reach a decision.  Or can they?  In a similar fashion to Twelve Angry Men, can one women change the minds of the rest of the jury to vote not guilty? The Holdout is a brilliant mystery by Graham Moore, a great writer […]



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