Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Red or Dead

The Pledge by Kathleen Kent

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This one followed the same pattern as the Hunger Games trilogy: interesting first book followed by an excellent second and a concluding one that basically made me say “Eh, ok, I guess that’s an ending.” Part of why I loved (indeed loved) The Burn, the second book in the Betty Rhyzyk trilogy, is because I thought Kathleen Kent did an excellent job covering Betty’s PTSD from the end of the events of the first book. Too often, series writers put their characters through hell only to have them […]

I love this series so much.

The Man Who Died Twice (Thursday Murder Club, #2) by Richard Osman

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I don’t even want to talk about it. I kind of want to read both books in the series again right now. They’re just the perfect mix of humor, pathos, mystery, cleverness, impishness, and intrigue. I continue to be so, so impressed by the way that Osman mixes these various elements together so well, so that one moment you’re laughing, one minute you’re puzzling out the mystery elements, and another you’re extremely sad because these character so perfectly represent the tragedy of being human, which […]

Happy Thanksgiving!

Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan, et al.

Mrs. March by Virginia Fieto

Quarry's Vote by Max Allan Collins

The Man Who Came Uptown by George Pelecanos

Hit List by Lawrence Block

The Overlook by Michael Connelly

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Happy Thanksgiving! In addition to feasting on food, I spend the holiday feasting on books. After a few long reads, I plowed through some things I’ve been meaning to get to for a while. Enjoy! Y: The Last Man **** I was excited to finally read this, being a big Brian K. Vaughan fan and being intrigued by the premise. Stephen King blurbed this as the best comic he ever read. The TV show looked good and I wanted to get in on it. And […]

Paula Hawkins third novel is her best one yet.

A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins

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Daniel Sutherland is found viciously murdered aboard his houseboat on the dock of a London canal by Miriam, an older woman on a neighboring boat. A troubled young woman, Laura, was seen leaving the docks covered in blood, and the police quickly zero in on her as the suspect, despite the fact they cannot find the murder weapon. Soon the people that best knew Daniel are pulled into orbit with one another and long-simmering resentment will erupt into a conflagration.  Motive is the question that […]

What the Rich Do in the Shadows

The Missing Hours by Julia Dahl

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___Nesting here for major triggers___     cn. the book itself describes the after effects of rape, revenge porn and other means of violence. If any of that is triggering or problematic for you, sit this one out. I grabbed Julia Dahl’s new standalone The Missing Hours on a bit of a whim. I read an interview she gave on the invaluable website crimereads.com and it seemed interesting. I had read The Invisible City a few years ago and enjoyed it well enough for a freshman effort so I […]

“Winter mornings are made of steel; they have a metallic taste and sharp edges. On a Wednesday in January, at seven in the morning, it’s plain to see that the world was not made for Man, and definitely not for his comfort or pleasure.”

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, Antonia Lloyd-Jones (translator)

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The Reading Women Challenge for 2021 (its last year, as it turns out) contains two challenges which surprisingly caused me some consternation – I didn’t have anything in my nearly 600 book deep to read list that was a book written by an Eastern European woman and/or a crime novel or thriller in translation. I spent time on and off all year hunting up a book that could work for both – it had to be out there and the whole point of this is […]



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