Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Just the same, Caroline, I think you should accept the fact you don’t really know the truth. I wonder if anyone does, or ever will.”

Silversword by Phyllis A. Whitney

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CBR 14 Bingo: Shadow In this book, the past casts long shadows, entangling the main character even in the present. Caroline Kirby, fresh off a divorce, returns to her childhood home in Hawaii, to the mother she had thought long dead and the mystery of her father’s death in a sacred volcano crater. I do like a certain flavor of vintage suspense books, with their gentle pace and their deep dark secrets. Here, the author set us up with a long ago mystery to solve, […]

“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 […]



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