Cannonball Read 16

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“It hits her full force that her mother is a mystery to her. She could have anything folded away inside her silence.”

The Hunter (Cal Hooper, #2) by Tana French

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Who am I kidding, this is five stars. It didn’t hit me as hard as previous books of hers have, but there is no fault here. She’s just a master of character and atmosphere, and she knows how to seed a twist in such a way that it has thematic value, not just shock value. Like its predecessor, The Searcher, this is a slow burn character study of a mystery. Also like The Searcher, this is a mystery where the investigation isn’t even the third most important […]

Good lord almighty, this book was depressing. #CBRBINGO – Adapt

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

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I was really looking forward to this one, but was unfortunately thwarted in my enjoyment by my own delicate little flower feelings. As it turns out, this is one of those books I like thinking about, writing about, and talking about more than I do the actual experience of reading of it. It put me in a terrible mood, and made me very unhappy. Wait, I take back the delicate flower thing. I’m more like a sponge, soaking up the atmosphere around me. And the […]

I’m still not sure I’m ok after this one…

The Winters by Lisa Gabriele

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    “Once I made up my mind to leave, a calm came over me. The fight was over. In fact, it felt less like leaving then like Asherley was pushing me out, rejecting me like a body rejecting an unfamiliar organ.” A modern twist on the classic “Rebecca” tale, our young heroine works for a charter company in the Caribbean and until she pays of the debt she owes her employer for her father’s funeral expenses, that is all she’s ever going to do. […]

“Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone can do anything.”

The Searcher by Tana French

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This was slower paced and less twisty-turny than her other books but I loved that about it. I liked her last book, The Witch Elm, but I loved this one. This is also a character study as well as a mystery/crime novel (that isn’t part of her Dublin Murder series), but here the protagonist is a former cop from Chicago who retired and decided to try and find peace in the Irish countryside. He bought a beaten down farmhouse and has spent a lot of […]

This was . . . weird.

Little Face (Spilling CID, #1) by Sophie Hannah

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Well, this was an experience. Disappointing, kind of bonkers, somehow still readable, lots of plot holes. It felt good to clean it off my TBR, and I’ll probably continue the series just because I’m curious about the bizarre relationship between the two detectives, but boy was it not what I was expecting. The premise of this book is a good one, one that I don’t think it really delivers on: a woman leaves her house for the first time since her two week old baby […]

“If I had to get there without friends, I could do it. Had been doing it. I’d never met anyone who brought me somewhere I wanted to stay, looked at me and saw someone I wanted to be for good; anyone who was worth giving up the more I wanted down the line.”

The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5) by Tana French

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This is still my least favorite Dublin Murder book, but I found a little something more in it this time. I was actually kind of dreading revisiting this one, because the prospect of getting inside all those teenage girls’ heads just felt like way too much to handle at the moment. I used to be a teenaged girl, and I do not miss it. French is such a good writer, so evocative, that I just knew it was going to bring me right back to […]



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