Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Great Short Story Involving Children’s Books

The Book Thing by Laura Lippman

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Well this wasn’t a bad short story involving Tess. I liked the overall message about the importance of books, but think at times that Lippman via Tess was throwing way too much out there about how readers that use e-book readers, and or bookstores to help them find books as being less than other readers was a bit much. I definitely get the pangs one gets when small bookstores and the like close. There was a used bookstore up the street from me that closed […]

Spirit of Christmas Past

O is for Outlaw by Sue Grafton

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This book was a great look into Kinsey’s past. We have heard offhand via the books that Kinsey was married twice. Her first marriage was to an ex-cop Mickey Macgruder and we know that Kinsey and he parted on bad terms. This book gives us even more information than what we were given before. Mickey was accused of murder and Kinsey bounced. She never talked to Mickey again after the divorce, but you start to see some glimmers in the man which probably is what […]

A book I did not expect to hate.

Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes

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I think I mostly hated this? Yeah. I did. And I don’t really know why. I liked but didn’t love The Shining Girls when I read it a couple of years ago. I assumed I would similarly like not love this. And it does sound creepy and intriguing. A boy turns up dead in Detroit, his top half attached to the dead body of a deer. There are multiple narrators, including a detective on the case, a teenager, a journalist, and a homeless man. But […]

Skål

The Locked Room by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

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I don’t know that the Martin Beck series can possibly be better than The Locked Room. It hits every critical talking point the writing staff have tried to address in previous tales and it becomes something else entirely. It’s almost as if this book is writing through the reader rather than to them. Some series don’t need to be read in sequential order. They may be even better if you don’t do that. I started the Lew Archer series out of order by accident and it’s my […]

Your Enemies Closer

Known to Evil by Walter Mosley

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Walter Mosley is such a versatile writer. While most famous for his Easy Rawlins mystery series, he’s worked in just about every genre one can think of: noir, hardboiled, scifi, fictional bio. The guy can do it all. The Leonid McGill series is the first series of his I’ve ventured from Easy Rawlins in his oeuvre. And it’s like they were written by two different people. Mosley got his writing start in the 80s. His books would get progressively better. As much as I enjoy Devil […]

Thrills and Chills

The Woman In The Window by A.J. Finn

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In the year since it’s been out, The Woman in the Window has been more noted for the drama of its author than the success of the book itself, thanks in large part to Ian Parker’s excellent New Yorker piece on Dan Mallory, aka “AJ Finn.” Reading it made me never want to pick up the book despite the breathless hype surrounding it. While i occasionally indulge in the Gillian Flynn thriller, I prefer more of a noir with this type of book, so I assumed this was of […]



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