Cannonball Read 11

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

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The Parisians Used to Poison Each Other With Menstrual Blood, and Other Weird Facts

City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris by Holly Tucker

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Nicolas de la Reynie has the distinction of being Paris’s first police chief, a position he stepped into during the reign of King Louis XIV.  Paris was a nasty cesspool full of criminals at the time, and de la Reynie turned things around by putting lamps up everywhere (which is how Paris came to be known as “the City of Light”). But not everything in Paris could be cured with a well-placed lamp.  During de la Reynie’s tenure, people in Paris were getting poisoned left and right…and the poisoning was thought to go all the way up to Versailles. See, […]

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1/30/2018 's CBR10 Review No:5 |

Pick Your Poison!

Pick Your Poison - A Short Story Anthology by Emma Nelson and Hannah Smith, Editors

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Pick Your Poison – A Short Story Anthology edited by Emma Nelson and Hannah Smith (2017) – Just in time for Halloween comes a short story collection with a clever theme: toxins.  Whether venomous snakes, raw almonds, quiet magic, or death by any of the other twenty-five poisonous tales in this collection, there’s a fitting demise for everyone. As with most anthologies I review, I’ll pick out several of the sterling tales that caught my squeamish attention.   But all the stories are clever, well-written, and very satisfying. “Beautiful Shadows” by Colleen Quinn – I felt as if I’d read a […]

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10/30/2017 's CBR9 Review No:38 |

We’ll always be troubled by how things are—that’s how it stands with the difficult gift of consciousness.

Nutshell by Ian McEwan

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By the time this came off the wait-list at the library, I had completely forgotten why my friend had recommended it to me, other than the obvious, which is that I love me some Ian McEwan. And what’s interesting to report now that I’ve read Nutshell is that I may have grown out of my McEwan faze, because this checked a LOT of my boxes but ultimately didn’t blow me out of the water. Which is not to say that this isn’t a beautiful book, it’s just a little bit removed from what stirs up my passions right now. I […]

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6/30/2017 's CBR9 Review No:21 |

Politics and Poison, Oh My!

Poison by Sara Poole

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A big shout-out to Aviva for sending this book my way during book exchange! This was a thoroughly enjoyable read. Francesca Giordano is a woman who needs a job after her father is brutally murdered in the street (don’t worry, you find this out in the first chapter), and she gets herself employed with the very prestigious, inherently corrupt Borgia family. Her employment soon has her on a wild ride through the world of Rome’s political and theological corruption as she follows Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia on his quest to win the papacy. One of Aviva’s reasons for sending me this […]

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1/4/2017 's CBR9 Review No:1 |

“Amory Lorch, Cersei Lannister, Chiswyck, Dunsen, Gregor Clegane, Ilyn Payne, Joffrey Baratheon, Meryn Trant, Forel Polliver, Raff the Sweetling, The Hound, The Tickler, Weese”…

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

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They broke the mold after Dumas wrote “The Count of Monte Cristo.” There will never be a revenge plot as ambitious, as smooth, as Rube Goldbergian, as violent, as tense, or as passionate as this. This is the Ur Revenge Plot. I devoured this book. Inhaled it. And it’s partly because my brain melted a bit after the election, and then I was doggedly rebuilding my spirits with Solnit’s “Hope in the Dark” (TBR) (GET OFF MY BACK), and then it was Thanksgiving, and I do a whole thing, because Thanksgiving is my Superbowl. Whatever. Anyway, I started on Saturday […]

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12/1/2016 's CBR8 Review No:44 |

Turow’s sequel to Presumed Innocent should be called Presumed Guilty

Innocent by Scott Turow

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In this sequel to Turow’s Presumed Innocent, Judge Rusty Savich is back with his brilliant but rage-filled bipolar wife Barbara, anguished over the state of his marriage, fearful of his imminent 60th birthday and once more vulnerable to the call of the wild—this time, with his lovely young assistant Anna. In the first book, Savich’s lust-filled affair preceded the woman’s horrible rape/murder and Savich barely escaped conviction for the crime. In Innocent, Savich’s new love affair flares, but his guilt overwhelms him and he eventually ends it. Still, he freaks when Anna and Rusty’s son Nat fall madly in love […]

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9/11/2014 's CBR6 Review No:68 |

Deaver’s Skin Collector is unfortunately NOT The Bone Collector

The Skin Collector by Jeffery Deaver

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Once again, we see Deaver at both his best and his worst. I am a long-time fan of Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme/Amelia Sachs forensic mysteries, and despite the fact that this latest novel contains Deaver’s hallmark thrills and chills and surprise twists and turns, I felt let down by the end. Perhaps it was because Deaver has such a complicated overlapping of plots that, in order to solve them all, he has our hero make 13th-hour leaps to conclusions which are simply not justified by the evidence—a violation, I would think, of Rhyme’s own strict forensic code if not of the […]

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6/5/2014 's CBR6 Review No:39 |


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