Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

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The first of the Southern Reach Trilogy is probably very familiar to most Cannonballers, so I won’t spend too long summarizing. A group of four women experts are sent in to investigate Area X, an environmental anomaly that has subsumed and remade a section of coast and wilderness and seems to be expanding. Theirs is the latest in a string of failed expeditions, after previous groups of men have either never returned, or come back changed. The women are given no names, only titles, and […]

Mindfreak Mystery

Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett

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First things first: all my caveats about this series from my review of Bangkok Tattoo still apply (book is written as the perspective of an easterner by a westerner). Everything in this series needs to be taken with that grain of salt. Still…wow. This book messed with my mind. In each of these tales, Burdett reaches for a complex plot, weaving in Buddhist theology and observations about life in Thailand and the eastern Pacific rim in general. Here, you could see a writer who is completely comfortable […]

Strong Debut

Mummy's Favorite by Sarah Flint

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Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review. Not too much to say here. I thought this was a strong debut. I think the biggest issue was the fact that we had two separate plots going on here that ended up confusing things. It would have been better to just stay on the main story-line (women and their son or daughter are being abducted) since there was a lot going on there. I also was left […]

Being 34th In Line to the Throne Is Not So Bad…

A Royal Pain by Rhys Bowen

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A Royal Pain by Rhys Bowen Finished Jan. 21, 2019, took six days to read 4 Stars on Goodreads Genre: Mystery/Thriller; Sub-genre: Cozy Mystery Rating 2/4 for 2019 overall, 1/1 for Mystery/Thriller This is the second book in the “Her Royal Spyness” cozy mystery series. Our heroine Lady Georgiana is 34th in line to the English throne in the mid-1930s, with her first cousin being the Prince of Wales who went on to abdicate the throne. Georgie, as her friends call her, has the title […]

The Main Line continues to get dumped on

Wicked by Sara Shepard

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The Pretty Little Liars series is marketed as Young Adult mystery, but I think that it may have been wrongly classified. Five books in, I am convinced that the only explanation for the behavior of many of the characters in the books is possession by evil spirits. Wicked is a continuation of the story begun in Pretty Little Liars. The first four books solve the mystery of the identity of ‘A’, a malevolent ghoul embodied by a superficial, text-obsessed teenage girl. Wicked is the fifth installment of this […]

The first Christie book I haven’t liked.

The Big Four (Hercule Poirot, #5) by Agatha Christie

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At first listening to this audiobook, I was enjoying myself quite a bit. Poirot was there, Hastings was there, back from Brazil, and aren’t we all having a good time now that this mysterious man has shown up in the bedroom, and then expired. Except pretty quickly after that, I realized in fact that the book was not good, and I was not enjoying myself, and even though I did listen to the whole thing in its entirety, I did not *listen* to the book […]



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