Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

The LONG Long Goodbye

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

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I picked this up thanks in large part to Megan Abbott’s review. It’s not her fault, though, that I didn’t like it. For Goodreads, Abbott talked about the book’s similarities to Robert Altman’s movie The Long Goodbye, mostly in terms of aesthetics, a forgotten Los Angeles, as well as the narrator’s anxiety. The Long Goodbye is one of my all time favorite movies, Chandler but better. So I had to grab this. And yeah, she is right that it gets the aesthetics well. I deeply felt […]

“Being a serial killer who kills serial killers is a great hobby… Until you find yourself locked in a cage.”

Butcher & Blackbird by Brynne Weaver

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CBR16 Sweet Books: Excited (I love this book and would like everyone I know to read it, but also understand that it’s very much NOT for everyone). Spoiler warning! I will do my best to review this without major plot spoilers, but if you want to experience this book without any prior knowledge of the contents, possibly skip this review until you’ve read the book. Sloane “Blackbird” Sutherland and Rowan “Butcher” Kane have a rather unusual meet cute. He finds her locked in a cage, […]

The Great Crime Boom

San Francisco Homicide Inspector 5-Henry-7 by Frank Falzon, Duffy Jennings

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As a homicide inspector in San Francisco during the 1970s and 80s, Frank Falzon investigated some of the most famous crimes of the decade, including the Night Stalker serial murders and the Moscone-Milk assassinations. I came to this book in a pretty serendipitous way. I’d just listened to an episode of My Favorite Murder in which the one of the hosts covered a case discussed in this book, which she’d come across because her cousin was a colleague of Falzon’s. Just a day later, when I […]

“There’s an old rule of thumb in prisons. Actually, it’s more of a life lesson. Always know what you’re walking into. Dark corners can be danger points.”

Dark Corners (Rachel Krall, #2) by Megan Goldin

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This is probably a three, three and a half star read, objectively (if there even is such a thing). It’s a little rushed, a little flawed, a little incomplete-feeling. But it hit me at the exact right time and mindset, so I had a great time and I read it super fast. The second book to feature Goldin’s podcasting reporter, Rachel Krall, Dark Corners kicks off when she is summoned to Florida by the FBI to meet with Terence Bailey, who is 48 hours away from being […]

To Catch A Killer…but make it funny

Killing Me by Michelle Gagnon

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Read as part of CBR15Bingo: On the road. The characters here take a couple of road trips, don’t want to say where or why, lest I spoil a big part of the book. You know a writer is really good when you’re enjoying a book solely for the writing even if you couldn’t care less about the plot (and not much more about the characters). That’s high praise — or perhaps even damning with faint praise. But I really enjoyed the experience of reading Michelle […]

Bodies? Bodies!

Hidden Bodies by Caroline Kepnes

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Read this as part of CBR14 Bingo: Bodies. Because it has “bodies” in the title and involves a lot of bodies, some alive, some dead.  You was by far one of the best books I read this year. Which surprised me given that I don’t care for books about serial killers; finding them monotonous and often gratuitously violent. Everyone is trying to rip off Hannibal Lecter these days (and has been for the last thirty years). But Caroline Kepnes has crafted a you-niquely (see what I did there? […]



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