Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“Separately, each cloud can block the wind. Together, we might determine its flow.”

Kill Her Twice by Stacey Lee

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Sisters May and Gemma Chow are working hard to keep their family afloat while their father is away being treated for tuberculosis. When they discover the body of Lulu Wong, a former classmate and rising Hollywood star on the outskirts of Chinatown, they set out to solve the mystery of her death. I’m always on the lookout for historical fiction that centers the experience of people who were marginalized during the era of the setting, because to see history through their eyes is usually completely […]

An entertaining read for Women’s History month

The Alewives: A Plague-Era Tale of Murder, Friendship and Fine Ale by Elizabeth R. Andersen

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Another shout out to Narfna for putting this on my radar. I am your literary stalker! This was a very entertaining murder mystery set in an era that has always fascinated me and featuring a set of unusual sleuths. I’d never read any of Elizabeth Andersen’s books before, but I gather that historical fiction is her thing and setting a murder in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death had me from the get go. Even better, the sleuths in this novel, which I hope […]

Alaska Alas

City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita

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When I looked up books similar to True Detective: Night Country, I couldn’t have known at the time that this would be what I was searching for. Alaska. Remote setting. Layered mystery. Suspicious locals. Detective with a troubled past. Check, check, check and check. This was one where I hurt myself trying to read and absorb as quickly as possible to get to the next page. Not surprising given that Iris Yamashita is a screenwriter. But having had mixed feelings in the past on screenwriters-turned-novelists, Yamashita […]

Maude Horton’s (Not So) Glorious (Semi) Revenge

Maude Horton's Glorious Revenge by Lizzie Pook

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Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review. Okay, first, I’m going to take the chance here that I’m going to sound ungrateful, but I mean this in the spirit of genuine feedback. Only giving out a PDF file for your ARC does not really encourage readers. It is very hard to read, limiting the devices on which it can be read. I could only read on my phone, which is a guaranteed recipe for […]

Not For The Children

The Legacy by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

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Having written a ton on the problematic nature of villainous adoptees in crime fiction, I went into Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s book with a healthy dose of skepticism that she could pull this off. I appreciate the authors work, having enjoyed The Last Ritual. I think she creates interesting characters and does a great job of bringing Iceland to life. But I kept hearing how twisty and shocking this was. And it involved three adoptees at the heart of the story. So my antennae was up. Did she […]

A Lineage of Madness

The Noh Mask Mystery by Akimitsu Takagi

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An aspiring mystery writer and his childhood friend must join forces to solve the mystery of a string of deaths in a prominent Japanese family that may be the result of an inherited curse. I’ve always enjoyed reading works in translation – they seem to bring you closer to the place in which they are set – but I definitely haven’t read many genre works. As such, I was intrigued by the prospect of this locked room murder mystery, written in 1949 but never before […]



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