Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Introducing Holmes and Watson

A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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Cbr11bingo Pajiba Reviewing mysteries is tough. One has to be careful not to spoil the story for others, and yet often the very issue I would want to address in my review is directly related to the big reveal in the story. I will do my best not to spoil A Study in Scarlet for others while trying to convey my concerns with it. A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887, is the first Sherlock Holmes mystery. The reader sees Holmes through the eyes of […]

Quirky, adorable mystery – perfect beach read.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

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This was a book that I voted for in our book club selections because of seeing it on several “Must Read” lists. I had no preconceived ideas about the plot, just knowing that others liked it. Fifteen year-old Bee is a typical teenager with a very untypical mother. Bernadette is outspoken, opinionated and is the definition of “marches to the beat of her own drum”. In a previous life she was an acclaimed architect, with designs that were revolutionary and award-winning. Now she is bordering […]

The perfect amount of creepy.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

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This was a book club pick in an attempt by our group to occasionally dip our toes into the classics. It had been in my TBR pile for a while, but I just hadn’t got to it yet, so being ‘forced’ into it was ok by me! Our heroine is an orphan girl working as a lady’s companion and we meet her as they are travelling abroad. During this trip, she meets the recently widowed Maxim de Winter. Despite his grief and melancholy, she makes […]

A relationship flow-chart would have been handy.

The Au Pair by Emma Rous

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This was an impulse buy while wandering Walmart waiting for a prescription to be filled by the pharmacy. I’d seen it on a couple lists of people I follow, and I figured, why not? On the night that twins Seraphine and Danny Mayes were born, their mother threw herself off a cliff to her death, the family’s au pair fled, and rumours in the town took root – calling the family home cursed, and speculations about the birth of twins being a bad omen. Fast […]

In A Hopeless Place

The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem

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Read as part of CBR11 Bingo: Listicle. “20 Best Crime Novels of 2018” -crimereads.com It’s interesting to me that Jonathan Lethem’s The Feral Detective made CrimeReads.com’s list of 20 best crime novels of 2018 considering how widely panned it was. Many reviewers said some variety of “How can the man who wrote Motherless Brooklyn produce such dreck?” I think such sentiment comes with unfortunately high expectations. I read Motherless Brooklyn earlier this year. It was excellent, definitely one of the best things I read in 2019. And it made me want […]

The Place That God Forgot

The Fourth Durango by Ross Thomas

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Read as part of CBR11 Bingo: summer read. I wasted too much of my life not reading Ross Thomas novels. I’ve been going through them the last two years and he’s become one of my all-time favorite writers. The “Elmore Leonard of politics” label is quite apt and The Fourth Durango, a tale packed with great characters and a fun premise, is one of the reasons why. The book itself is part mystery, part thinking person’s “thriller” and part excuse to get a bunch of people in […]



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