Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Hardboiled

Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem

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Jonathan Lethem has this habit of writing detective novels and adding his own little curlicues on them. Motherless Brooklyn is fronted by a Tourette’s-minded “detective.” The titular character in The Feral Detective loves runaway animals of all kinds (feral included) and is an escaped cultist. Gun, With Occasional Music is set in a future society and has musical guns and talking animals. Lethem has spoken a lot about his major influences, including my favorite mystery writer Ross Macdonald. What impressed me about this, his first effort, is how polished it is. […]

Sex Mystery sounds like a genre I want to read much more of.

Hither, Page (Page & Sommers, #1) by Cat Sebastian

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Well, the sex part of this certainly wasn’t as prevalent as the mystery, but it did deliver on Sebastian’s other promise, which was “Agatha Christie, but make it gay.” Small English village, check. The mysterious murder of one of their own, check. The discovery that the small village is hiding a bunch of secrets, check. An outsider coming in to unearth those secrets, check. Lonely spy falls in love with traumatized country doctor, check. This was very sweet in terms of the romance, and pretty […]

A murder mystery within a murder mystery, and a lovely homage to the genre.

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

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I really, really enjoyed this one. I’ve struggled the past several weeks to really get into the books I’m reading, even if I’m liking them. But I just fell into this book. Horowitz has a lot of fun playing around with his premise and the conventions of a whodunit, and it’s fun to read as a result. The book opens with a frame story. Alan Conway, the famous author of the Atticus Pünd detective books, has turned in his last Pünd book, and his editor […]

Checking In

Out On the Cutting Edge by Lawrence Block

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Although there is a mystery at the heart of the novel, eventually growing to encompass two mysteries, this feels like more of a hangout tale. Apparently, Lawrence Block never meant for his star character Matthew Scudder to go beyond four or five books but after writing a flashback tale in When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, he decided to expand the series to Scudder’s life post-alcohol. Out on the Cutting Edge, book seven in the series, is the first of those efforts and it feels like Block […]

The End/ Beginning of Tess

Hush Hush by Laura Lippman

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Sigh. What a great book this was. I was initially skeptical for how Lippman was doing this (interview style format sprinkled with third person POVs) but it really works. I also liked the conversation around motherhood. A mother killing their child is seen as being a horrific thing with a lot of people not even wanting to get to the point they can understand how that happens. I thought that everything really worked in this one. The characters, the writing, the flow, and even the […]

Knight Errant

Songs of Innocence by Richard Aleas

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There’s a reason why I don’t often revisit books I liked once upon a time: they’re probably not as good as I remember. When I reread stuff, it’s usually to either confirm or satisfy some sort of curiosity about the first dance I had with a book. Otherwise, I’d just as soon let it sit in my memory as I’d prefer. I’ll probably never revisit “Richard Aleas”‘ (Charles Ardai’s) Little Girl Lost. It was one of my favorite books from 2010. I remember it being a thrilling […]



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