Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“My dear chap, this is a bookshop. There’s never anywhere better to be.”

Slippery Creatures by K.J. Charles

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CBR14 Bingo: Snake (SPOILER: being a thoroughly disreputable sort, Kim also turns out to betray Will at least once during the story) Will Darling has inherited his late uncle’s bookshop and is grateful for the fact. After serving in World War I, most of his skills involve killing swiftly and efficiently, not really a commodity on the post-war job markets back in England. Now he just needs to get some idea of all the books actually in the shop and get on with being a […]

Toxic Friendships That Lead to Murder

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley

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CBR Bingo: Snakes The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley was the December 2021 Mocha Girls Read book club selection. The theme was “snow on the cover”. I’ve heard a bunch of hype around this book. I am also a sucker for a cozy mystery or a thriller tv show. So I was more than a little intrigued. Everyone is a suspect so this works rather nicely for the “Snakes” square. We meet a group of friends who went to Oxford together and are stuck in […]

“Even in his final moments, I doubt he learned his lesson. But I didn’t kill him to teach him a lesson; I killed him to carve him out of this world like a tumor. And I’d do it again.” #CBRBINGO – Gaslight

They Never Learn by Layne Fargo

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It takes a lot for a thriller to get five stars from me, but this book fully earns it. I’m fairly certain that unless I have an exceptionally stellar rest of the year, this book will be making it into my top ten books of the year, maybe even my top five. I have made nearly all of my IRL friends read it, so now I want everyone who I have only met virtually to read it, too. It gave me joy. I do not […]

“Tea had featured heavily in the past fortnight. Miriam sometimes felt her belly sloshing with it, like a waterbed”

Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner

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Scandal – a very British scandal, stiff upper lip, what will the neighbors say? I stumbled across Susie Steiner, the author of the DS Manon Bradshaw series, when I read of her death, July 2nd, in the Guardian (and, by the way, this is an enjoyable obituary, if an obituary can be said to be ‘enjoyable’! https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jul/13/susie-steiner-obituary). Steiner was a former journalist who lived with retinitis pigmentosa and succumbed, at the very premature age of 51, to brain cancer. The obituary notes that Ms. Steiner […]

The Girl on the (Subway) Train

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

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A.k.a. the time that a weaponised use of Freddie Mercury had me sobbing at 1am with the book pressed against my forehead, begging for a happy ending. Yeah. In my defence, the reason I was doing that was that the book would not let me put it down until I have finished, after I had brazenly decided to start a reading session at 11:30pm in bed, knowing that I was heading into the climax. One Last Stop is Casey McQuiston’s follow up to Red, White and […]

“He wants to punch something, but he knows that would do nothing but bust his knuckles. Having that much sense makes him feel old.”

The Searcher by Tara French

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So this is the first time I am participating in Bingo and I am so excited! I love the card and I have finished a few books, so I am ready to go…. I was out of the ‘mystery’ frame of mind for some time. I think, for a while, I was concerned that many mystery series that I enjoyed portrayed police officers in a way that didn’t sit well with me given so much police inaction and violent action around the US, where I […]



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