Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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A masterclass in the novella; body horror and racism collide.

Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark

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We know that the people who join the Ku Klux Klan are monsters. Average people who act in monstrous, horrible ways. But what if some of the Klan members were actual monsters? Giant, hulking, dog-like beasts that want to consume and destroy Black people? Such is the premise of Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark. Maryse, a Black woman, hunts these monsters in Prohibition America with the help of her magical sword infused with the anger, pain, and despair of Black men and women of […]

Snorky

The Confessions of Al Capone by Loren Estleman

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This one is a tough book to pull off. There’s already tons of bs associated with the legend of Al Capone that it’s tough to discern the truth. Fortunately, Loren Estleman, a writer who I’ve been meaning to read for a very long time, gets it well. Estleman’s research is incredible. I read Max Alan Collins’ Scarface and the Untouchable before this so a lot of it was fresh in my head. I figured he (Estleman) might fudge the facts in order to tell a more compelling […]

The Chicago Way

Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago by Max Alan Collins

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I’ve been waiting for this book for years. There are so many works out there about Al Capone, most of them more fact than fiction, few of them recounting the gritty details of his battles with Eliot Ness during Prohibition. The Untouchables movie is more fantasy than reality, so was the TV show, depicting a Manicheean struggle between good and evil, law and order, etc. I wanted something that covered the full details of how these two met on the playing field of Chicago and what actually […]

Where the Gin is Cold

Murder Knocks Twice by Susanna Calkins

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Read this one with my wife. This is our co-review. I liked it well enough for a first book in the series, though I’m not sure I’ll continue. Susanna Calkins gets the era well enough without having to resort to too many cliches. I like the world she builds and the mystery is interesting enough, if not overly complex. After a rocky start, it really catches itself and I was engaged to the end. The problem I had with the story, and the reason why […]

Shoulda Beena Contenda

Button Man by Andrew Gross

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Button Man is my first Andrew Gross novel and it may be my last. Not because it’s bad; at three stars, it’s definitely not. But because it’s bland, predictable, uninspiring. And with a set up that’s right in my wheelhouse: gangsters, Prohibition, New York, etc., I should’ve liked it a lot more than I did. Positives: Gross does get the era of 30s New York right. Supposedly, this story was inspired by tales of his family, some of whom were Jewish immigrants from Russia. I don’t […]



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