Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I am forty four and I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.”

Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent

by Leave a Comment

When Sally catapults to national attention for putting her adoptive father’s body out with the trash, little does she know that this is not the first time she’s been in the headlines. I don’t read a lot of suspense, but after seeing this book all over my Goodreads feed the last couple of years I was sufficiently intrigued. That’s a pretty startling image to start off with, one’s father in the trash! Nugent creates a fascinating dual character study following Sally and Peter, and I […]

“Stop dreaming about the spires. It was a dreadful place and those were dreadful people, and you and I got caught in their games and paid for it.”

Death in the Spires by K.J. Charles

by 2 Comments

If you read The Secret History and hated the characters, and the bleak ending made you feel terrible, this might be the book for you! In her first non-romance, we’ve got K.J. Charles trying her hand (and succeeding) at a historical mystery, dark academia style. It’s 1905, and our main character is Jeremy “Jem” Kite, who has just been fired from his job when a letter accusing him of murder showed up in his employers’ mail. This is not the first or even the tenth such letter […]

Irish Goodbye

Everybody Dies by Lawrence Block

by Leave a Comment

When I first read Everybody Dies a few years ago, I found it disappointing. Matt partnering with his gangster friend Mick Ballou sounded like fun but the execution was meh. Block used it as an excuse to kill off a lit of auxiliary characters from previous books, while the killer himself wasn’t especially interesting and I didn’t feel like I understood Ballou’s character more than I already did. So I wasn’t really jazzed to go back to it for my Scudder re-read, which is almost complete. But […]

Understandable how you could mistake this knife fetishist for a murderer, but he didn’t do it.

Knife Skills for Beginners by Orlando Murrin

by 2 Comments

Thanks to NetGalley, RBmedia, and Recorded Books for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. Yes, this book was written by a TV chef. Apparently he was on Masterchef—I’ve never seen it. But unless he used a very secret ghostwriter, he did a good job! I truly have no idea why the ratings for this book are so low coming out of the UK*, or why the cozy mystery people have not come flocking (though this isn’t a cozy, it does have […]

A Curious Story Indeed

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

by 2 Comments

“I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.” I’m not sure what I expected from this book, but to say I was pleasantly surprised is putting it mildly.  This book languished on my TBR for over a decade.  I don’t know why I avoided it, but I just never got around to picking it up.  I ended up listening […]

Not a single clue to these murders is found in a fjord

Hildur (The Clues in the Fjord) by Satu Rämö

by Leave a Comment

Nowhere Books 2025 Bingo: A book in translation Hildur Rúnarsdóttir is a police investigator on Iceland’s harsh and rather sparsely populated west coast. When she was only a child, her two younger sisters disappeared without a trace, and now she’s the head of the division for missing children in her part of the country. Her only remaining relative is her aunt, who she eats dinner with every Monday. Her aunt raised her after her parents died in a car accident about a year after her […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo