Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Hunter

The Hunter by Richard Stark

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This novel is a bare-knuckle revenge thriller with a despicable protagonist who enacts violence on people slightly more despicable than him. Parker has just escaped from prison, where he’d been picked up as a vagrant. He wasn’t actually a vagrant but was in disguise in order to lay low after a bad job (he’s in the organized heist business). His partner and his wife betrayed him, and she shot him and left him for dead. Now back in town, he’s trying to figure out who […]

Extra Reading

Who Is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews

Players by Don DeLillo

A Stained White Radiance by James Lee Burke

Louise Hathcock: Queen of the State Line Mob by Robert Broughton

Lemons Never Lie by Richard Stark

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I’m trying to document all of the books I read on here to better hit my cannonball numbers. These are ones I’ve been meaning to upload into combined reviews but haven’t. Some are good, some are eh, but most of them just didn’t merit a lot of words from me at the time I finished them for various reasons. Who Is Maud Dixon? *** For a similar identity-based thriller I read last year, a reviewer derisively pegged it as The Talented Mr. Rip-off. I didn’t […]

Binge

The Blackbird by Richard Stark

Dead Connection by Alafair Burke

The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black

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Anytime I finish a tome (in this case, Don DeLillo’s Underworld), I tend to binge read in order to get back in the swing of things. Here are three books I picked up over the weekend… The Blackbird *** Someone asked on Twitter recently that if you could take three traits from a writer for yourself, what would they be? I should have mentioned Donald Westlake’s amazing versatility. Just consider the Grofield series: first a heist tale, then a locked room mystery, now a spy thriller, […]

Reading, Reading, Reading, RAWHIDE!

The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

The Dame by Richard Stark

Tricky by Josh Stallings

Quarry's Deal by Max Alan Collins

The Plea by Steve Cavanagh

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I read a lot last week but also had a busy week at work (a good busy). Every time I tried to write a review on one of these books, all of them good, I just didn’t have the time or energy. So here’s a big update dump of the stuff I read in the last week and I’d be glad to tease them out more in the comments if anyone is curious… “The True History of the Kelly Gang” I enjoyed large parts of […]

Murder, They Wrote (And Directed)

Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas by Glenn Kenny

The Big Fix by Roger L. Simon

The Damsel by Richard Stark

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I went on a bit of an unexpected reading tear these last few days, which is good because I need to clear some space off the TBR pile in advance of reading Barack Obama’s new book.   Moonflower Murders 4 Stars ::Trigger Warning:: Tragic homosexual plot And how sad it is because the book didn’t need it. I was curious as to how Anthony Horowitz was going to follow up with his superb Magpie Murders series. He does so by giving us most of an Atticus Pünd novel, […]

Touchdown

The Seventh by Richard Stark

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Every aspiring writer, whether or not they like crime fiction, should read “Richard Stark” (Donald Westlake)’s Parker series. Not because the books are good, though they are. But because Westlake, like other great writers, has crisp, lean prose that lends itself to the telling of a story. Not a word is wasted. And no matter what kind of story you write, if you write it like this, you’ll never halt narrative momentum. The story itself is fun enough but tough to recall with 250+ words. Parker novels aren’t really […]



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