Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“It seemed absurd, a monster going monster hunting. But why not?”

Pack of Lies by Charlie Adhara

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CBR14Bingo – Star: Julien’s the sort of actor who’s mostly recognizable, but his glory days seem to be behind him. I deeply loved the Big Bad Wolf series, so while I was happy to see Cooper and Oliver finally get their HEA I was sad to say goodbye to the world. Well, luckily we have a new spinoff series starring Eli. While he was a character in past books (and there’s more cameos as well), I’d say you could pick this up as a standalone, […]

The Convenience of Train Travel

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

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Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’m not a big fan of mystery but Agatha Christie has a way of making look past that. Set in the years between WWI and WWII, “Murder on the Orient Express” has murder, glamor, intrigue, and train travel. Oh, and Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective that features in many of Ms. Christie’s books. Poirot is between cases and is looking forward to a vacation. We start in northern Syria as he […]

Cozy Botswanan Mystery

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

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This is the first novel in the eponymous long-running series (22 books over 20+ years) by Alexander McCall Smith. It introduces us to Mma Precious Ramotswe, a canny and capable Botswanan woman who takes her inheritance from her father to start a detective agency in Botswana’s capital city of Gaborone. Rather than a single mystery, the novel is structured more like short stories with overlapping characters, albeit progressing in time- each chapter is a new small mystery for Mma Ramotswe to solve. This first installment […]

The continuing adventures of Will and Kim

The Sugared Game by K.J. Charles

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CBR14 Bingo – Shadow (spies and all sorts of murky shenanigans throughout the story) This is book two in a series, and it really doesn’t work very well on its own. To start from the beginning, read Slippery Creatures first. Will Darling has settled more comfortably into his role as a London bookseller but has seen nor heard anything from the mysterious Lord Arthur “Kim” Secretan for several months. He has done his best to forget all about the man and get on with his life, agreeing to […]

August 2022 Leftovers

Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood by Jane Leavy

Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Man Who Liked to Look at Himself by K.C. Constantine

The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris

Inside the Empire: The True Power Behind the New York Yankees by Bob Klapisch and Pete Solotaroff

Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child

Finley Ball: How Two Outsiders Turned the Oakland As into a Dynasty and Changed Baseball Forever by Nancy Finley

Sea Change by Robert B. Parker

The Hunting Wives by May Cobb

The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay

Ms. Tree, Volume 1 by Max Alan Collins

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Some extra books I read in August. What a miserably hot month… Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood**** Less a conventional biopic on The Mick and more a look at his life vis-a-vis his legend and the backdrop of postwar America. Not as thorough as I would’ve liked but still riveting given how Jane Leavy presents her subject.   Greenwich Park*** Again glad I slept on my review. I really liked how this started but after a while, it morphed into […]

Not the surefire hit I thought it would be.

Stay Awake by Megan Goldin

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Thanks to NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review. I’m as surprised as anyone that I didn’t really like this. It wasn’t a bad read, and there were parts I really liked, but a large part of this book just felt extremely frustrating to me, rather than the intriguing and unsettling the author was going for (I think). Stay Awake kicks off with our MC, Liv, waking up in a taxi with no memory of how she got there, and […]



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