Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

In the City of LA

The Empty Glass by JI Baker

A Student of History by Nina Revoyr

Friend of the Devil (Reckless #2) by Ed Brubaker

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By both design and coincidence, I read three consecutive books on Los Angeles over the last 48 hours. The first two were good 4-star reads and the third was an excellent 5-star one… The Empty Glass Oliver Stone’s Blonde. This got poor reviews and I guess I get it? I suppose it depends on what your expectations are. Me personally, I enjoyed this wild romp through Los Angeles as a low level county morgue guy tries to unravel a government conspiracy around Marilyn Monroe’s death. […]

Hold On Tight

I Let You Go by Clare MacKintosh

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Note: I’m not going to spoil this book but I am going to give away something about the plot machinations regarding this book. If you want to go into this book tabula rasa, skip this review (and really, all reviews because I have no doubt they will inevitably mention what I’m about to mention). If you don’t mind knowing something specific with regards to the plot, even though it is not at all a spoiler, read on. Nest… …   There’s nothing I hate more […]

Bodies, bodies, bodies, but make it ancient Egypt

Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie

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The place is Thebes, the year is 2000 B.C. and the bodies are piling up! Death Comes as the End is an Agatha Christie mystery set in ancient Egypt; it is the only historical mystery Christie wrote, and the only one to feature entirely non-European characters. The novel kicks off with the family patriarch, Imhotep, returning home to Thebes (modern day Luxor) with a new concubine, Nofret. Nofret, who is decades younger than her new partner, is beautiful but cruel. She quickly antagonizes the rest […]

Well-written but not for me.

I'm the Girl by Courtney Summers

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review. I don’t think Courtney Summers is for me. I’ve tried three of her books now. This is an extremely well-written and timely young adult thriller that is supposedly about the death of a young girl found on the side of the road, but it’s really about how the world is built to use up pretty young women and undermine their self-worth, and what that looks like. The main […]

Memory Whole

A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham

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Stacy Willingham doesn’t imbue a Louisiana-based novel with enough Louisiana-ness but that’s about the only real complaint I have of her stellar debut effort here. As a frequent mystery/thriller/crime reader, I know all the tricks and tells. I know when I’m about to be duped. I generally know who the killer is early on. There’s just only so many ways a writer can retell the same story. This is why I find myself more often interested in the whydunnit than the who- or howdunnit. What […]

“The thing is, and maybe I’m biased by all those years I’ve spent in fictional realms built on deceit, I don’t trust narrators any more than I trust the actual people in my life. We never get the whole truth, not from anybody.” #CBRBINGO – Elephant

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

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This was the first of two extremely entertaining thrillers that I read by Peter Swanson in 2022. I fear I may have read his best work now, so I’m not sure if I’ll be checking out any more of his stuff, but I can absolutely recommend Eight Perfect Murders as a stand-out thriller (along with The Kind Worth Killing). Holy shit, was this thing a page-turner. So the plot here is that bookshop owner Malcolm Kershaw, years ago, compiled a list of literature’s most perfect […]



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