Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“You’ve done enough poking around, this is getting stupid. You’re not some kind of pregnant Miss Marple.”

The It Girl by Ruth Ware

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It was perfectly fine! But I still don’t get the Ruth Ware obsession that some people have. Our “It Girl” is April Coutts-Cliveden, who is murdered her freshman year at Oxford, and who had “that thing”. The main character and narrator is her roommate and “best friend”, Hannah, who has experienced ten years of PTSD and harassment from journalists and the public because she was the one who found April’s body, and it was her testimony that sealed the conviction of the murderer, John Neville, […]

They sure did smoke all the time back in the day, didn’t they? (double bingo)

Madam, Will You Talk? by Mary Stewart

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CBR14 Bingo: Question (the book’s title is a question and there is a central murder mystery where the identity of the murderer is in question) Young widow Charity Selborne is on holiday in the south of France with her friend Louise and they really have little planned except to enjoy the good food, nice drinks, beautiful scenery, and long drives. In Avignon, Charity befriends a young English boy who is also staying at the hotel, offering to take him with her on tours of the […]

Father of Mine

Fresh Kills by Bill Loehfelm

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Read as part of cbr14 bingo: birds. There are birds on the cover of the book. Bill Loehfelm is a writer that deserves to be celebrated more than he is. I remember picking up The Devil She Knows more out of curiosity than excitement. I wanted to see how Loehfelm would bring Staten Island to life. What I got instead was one of the best crime novels I’ve read the last few years. I got caught up in Maureen’s story. I followed her to New Orleans and while […]

“Kim was starlight and privilege; Will had his feet firmly fixed in the mud. They didn’t belong together. Except they did.”

Subtle Blood by K.J. Charles

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CBR14 Bingo: Scandal (the book features corruption, blackmail, kidnapping, and murder – not to mention gay people in the 1920s. Gasp!) Spoiler warning! This is the third book in a trilogy. While you can absolutely read this book without the others, you will not get all the beautiful payoff from various earlier storylines that way. Also, this review will contain mild spoilers for earlier in the series. Start with Slippery Creatures. For the last few months, Lord Arthur “Kim” Secretan and Will Darling have actually […]

Well, I am not proud of it, but a fellow has to make a living and I was blessed with two assets – a passably handsome face and an exquisitely persuasive tongue.

An Impossible Imposter by Deanna Raybourn

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CBR14BINGO: Font Square (BINGO! Shadow to Font) (I’m not sure what the fonts are, but they grace the cover of every Veronica Speedwell novel along with that unmistakable silhouette cover art situation. I can spot it on a crowded bookshelf a mile away and it always makes me happy.) Somehow I managed not to snatch this up as soon as it came out. Usually, I put myself on the library wait list before the next book in the Veronica Speedwell mystery series is published. Raybourn is a favorite of mine, and […]

The village of hysterical women.

The Village of Eight Graves (Kosuke Kindaichi, #3) by Seishi Yokomizo

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Whaaaat the heck happened here. This was a mess. In fact, I had such a different reading experience with this third translated book in the Kosuke Kindaichi series that I kind of have to wonder if it was me and not the book, since presumably the English publisher chose to translate and publish this one third out of all the many, many available books in the series for a reason (and it’s not third in original publication order). I really wasn’t expecting to have such […]



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