Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Old School Hollywood with Demon Deals

Siren Queen by Nghi Vo

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Holy crap, I want more! Siren Queen is the story of Luli Wei, a star who stole her sister’s name to become famous and became the monster in many films, but also managed to find love and friendship outside the monstrous side of Hollywood. There are elements of this that remind me of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, mainly the narration style and the old Hollywood setting. But do not go into Siren Queen expecting the same story or same kinds of characters. Luli […]

“He really does have very nice biscuits.”

Finlay Donovan Knockes 'Em Dead (Finlay Donovan, #2) by Elle Cosimano

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I love this series. I’m so happy there will be at least two more books full of wacky hijinks, dead body disposal, panicking over money, BFF frandship moments between Finlay and Vero, meta commentary, and I’m sure stuff I can’t even predict because this series is chaos. Beautiful chaos. Finlay Donovan, romantic suspense and crime author, keeps getting herself into these situations involving real life crime. It’s been several months since the first book, and it seems this time around, someone has taken a hit […]

Cannonballing with teenage murder detectives.

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder (A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, #1) by Holly Jackson

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I was so pleasantly surprised by this one. It was an excellent choice to be reading on my birthday* to make up for the fact that my body is slowly succumbing to the forces of entropy. *Which was now over a month ago, whoopsie. I’m wary with YA these days, especially contemporary YA, because I want a good story and good characters, not plot gimmicks and sensationalism, and books that are read by people like I used to be as a teenager (no discernment whatsoever). […]

Hopefully the last one of these I three-star for a while.

A Better Man (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #15) by Louise Penny

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Not too much to say about this one. Not one of my favorites of this series. Parts of it I really liked, and parts of it I really did not. It’s been over a month now, and I’ve read 1,000 books since then, so I’m really not remembering specifics here. I remember there was a missing woman, and that plotline was interesting. I wished I was more interested in the plotline where Gamache comes back to be the head of the homicide department, a move […]

Charm, Shame, Desire, Justice, Pride, and Pain

The Bone Orchard by Sara A Mueller

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Charm is a bone witch, a prisoner, and a whore. Alongside the boneghosts that she grew in her laboratory, she runs a brothel at Orchard House. When her keeper the old emperor lies dying, poisoned, he charges her with safeguarding the empire and finding out which of his sons was his killer. Firstly, that cover is utterly beautiful. Now that this important matter is acknowledged, let us go on into the story. I saw a lot of complaints that it was difficult to understand, for […]

Does Crime Pay?

Boss of Bosses: The Fall of the Godfather: The FBI and Paul Castellano by Andris Kurins and Joseph F. O'Brien

Sacred by Dennis Lehane

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I hadn’t meant to review these books together but I finished Sacred sooner than I anticipated and it just makes sense to cover them both in one review…   Boss of Bosses I just finished rewatching The Godfather in honor of its 50th anniversary and I decided to tackle this one because the agents applied the movie title as a sobriquet for Paul Castellano, the mob boss of the Gambino crime family who is perhaps most famous as being the guy in John Gotti’s way that got killed in […]



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