Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Forevermore

The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Bayard

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Read as part of cbr14bingo: gaslight. This book took place in gaslight era New York state. There’s even a gaslight on the book cover!  Most of the time, I ditch the vaunted 5th star from an otherwise excellent book due to the ending. I’m usually disappointed by endings and even if I try to be graceful, I still can sometimes get disappointed by one. I can’t recall ever bumping a book from four stars to five due to the ending, yet here we are. I’m not […]

First Bingo!!!!

The Book of Night by Holly Black

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I saw The Book of Night sitting in the “New This Month!” display at the library when I went to pick up something else. And I love Holly Black, so I took it out on a whim. The Book of Night follows Charlie, a woman who’s spent her whole life making all the wrong decisions. In Charlie’s world, shadows are magic and with the right formulas, can be manipulated, stolen, reattached, or end up as sentient beings. At a young age, Charlie got into the world of […]

Good Cop/Bad Cat

The Eloquent Scribe: The Sitehuti and Nefer-Djenou-Bastet Series Book 1 by T. Lee Harris

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Cbr14bingo Font The main character is an Egyptian scribe turned investigator The Eloquent Scribe is the first book in a mystery series set in ancient Egypt and features a pair of unlikely investigators — Sitehuti the junior scribe and Nefer-Djenou-Bastet (aka Neffi), the sacred cat of the Temple of Bastet in capital city Pi-Ramesses. While the “mystery” in this novel is pretty straight forward and not terribly hard to solve for the reader, the charm of the story is in the characters and the potential […]

As Little As Possible

An Honest Living by Dwyer Murphy

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Whew this is rough. I got hyped for this book just by reading the blurb. A literary mystery in mid-aughts NYC? Rock on, brother. And then I read interviews by Dwyer Murphy and got even more pumped. His favorite authors are my favorite authors and his views on crime fiction mine. And THEN some favorite writers such as Walter Mosley and Andrea Baartz blurbed it. Another dropped a Chinatown reference to the plot. So…this rocked right? Yes? Sigh. On some level, I’m sure folks will […]

“He played the part of the devil too successfully. But he was not the devil. Au fond, he was a stupid man. And so – he died.”

Cards on the Table (Hercule Poirot, #14) by Agatha Christie

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I just love the atmosphere of a good Agatha Christie book. There’s not really anything like it. I was bit of a dum-dum and started listening to this one (with classic Christie narrator, Hugh Fraser) while doing stuff at work and didn’t pay it sufficient attention at first, and so was feeling a bit lost. Which is a shame! Because once I started paying attention, I had a really good time with this one. It’s a bit different than Christie’s other mysteries, in that we […]

Triple Cannonballing with one of the cleverest books I’ve ever read. #CBRBINGO – Minds

Malice (Detective Kyoichiro Kaga, #1) by Keigo Higashino

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Well, this was a ride. Malice was one of the most interesting and compelling mysteries I’ve ever read. I love it when authors play with the format of a genre, and that seems to be something Higashino does well. I really can’t say too much about this one without completely spoiling it, but this book’s plot covers the murder and murder investigation of the famous Japanese novelist, Kunihiko Hidaka. The book is told in alternating POVs from Hidaka’s childhood friend, Osamu—who is writing a chronicle of […]



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