Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Come for the Historical Lady Police Offer, Stay for the Cozy Mystery

An Orphan of Hell's Kitchen by Liz Freeland

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Full disclosure, I requested this book based on its description and did not realize it was the third book in a series! It’s a testament to the author that I didn’t feel out of sorts reading this novel out of order as she did a good job ensuring any plot points from the first books were subtly explained or inconsequential. Louise, our main character, is a policewoman in New York City right before the United States enters World War I. Louise has German immigrant parents […]

Got The Power

The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch

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Breathe. I’m amused that Blake Crouch blurbed this book. I’ve read a few of his and I always like the concept more than the execution. This is the book he has always wanted to write. This is a legitimately great book. I usually don’t do genre mashups. Give me mystery (my favorite genre) or science fiction (an occasional dabble) but don’t give me both. The Inception-meets-True Detective tagline didn’t inspire me as much as it probably did others who tried this (and for what it’s worth, this […]

The Silent Patient is a good book but I didn’t like it

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

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This is a hard book for me to rate because it was fascinating and compelling but I didn’t like it.  Alicia Berenson hasn’t spoken since she murdered her husband six years earlier. To outsiders, they seemed to have a perfect marriage. She was a beautiful, successful painter, and he was a handsome, famous photographer. They were madly in love. So why did she shoot him in the face 5 times?  Theo Faber has recently joined the Grove as its new psychotherapist. Part of why he […]

A New Start

The Slasher by Michael Collins

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Because he toiled in relative obscurity compared to his contemporaries, I don’t know much about Dennis Lynds’ (“Michael Collins”) evolution as a writer. Part of my disillusionment with the last few Dan Fortune novels, which sag in talent after an awesome start, is how Collins seemed to regress. Obviously, when you do a series for a long time, a rhythm develops and plots become familiar but my biggest issue was how Lynds reverted to lazy, familiar PI tropes that weren’t there in his earlier work. […]

Telephone!

A Walk Among the Tombstones by Lawrence Block

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One thing I’ve come to appreciate about Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder series the further I get into it is how unique each book feels. Sure, as with any writer one reads a lot of, I’m used to Block’s rhythms and characters but every plot and finale feels fresh. I’m ten books into this series and it’s remarkable that he can keep such a streak going. There are other series I like more than this one but I can’t say the same about them. Block is […]

If I Had a Dollar for Every Dead Guy I Found In My Tub…

Whose Body by Dorothy L. Sayers

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Lord Peter Wimsey is one of those characters that just sort of kept popping up in random places in my life. I think if you are at all into mystery novels you may have had a similar experience. For whatever reason, however, I never actually read one. So, when I hit a point where I didn’t have a book on deck I went to my handy library app and looked up the first one. I really loved it, but it was not at all what […]



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