Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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The Titles Aren’t Subtle, but the Books are Substantial

Stillhouse Lake (Book 1) by Rachel Caine

Killman Creek (Stillhouse Lake series book 2) by Rachel Caine

Wolfhunter River by Rachel Caine

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Gina Royal didn’t know she was married to a monster. Her whole life changed  as she pulls up to her home where there’s been an accident. A drunk driver crashes   into her husband’s garage turned “workspace” revealing that what Melvin Royal was actually working on in that garage was becoming a prolific serial killer.  At first, the police don’t believe that Gina had no knowledge of what her husband had been doing so for two years, she lost her children and was embroiled in a […]

Serial Bad Writing

The Killer Book of Serial Killers by Tom Philbin and Michael Philbin

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For a research library, my university’s stacks are pretty lacking in texts that are actually helpful to most students’ work, so I often help out my students by taking out books from my own library system. This is how I ended up with The Killer Book of Serial Killers. I would never have selected this myself based on the cover alone, but my student found it and was intrigued, and who am I to judge the sources he wants to use for his Criminology final? We […]

Pop, six, squish, uh-uh, Cicero, Lipschitz

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

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I had been looking forward to this novel since I read the first reviews several months ago and it did not disappoint. What a fantastic debut! The novel opens with Korede getting a phone call from her sister. Her boyfriend is dead, and she needs help cleaning up. And it’s not the first time Korede has gotten this kind of call from her younger sister Ayoola. This novel is fun, dark and a very quick and enjoyable read. It’s the story of an older sister […]

Truly one of my white whales. #CBRBingo

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Project: Catch Up On Review Backlog, review #6 out of 11 The Alienist has been on my TBR practically since I joined Goodreads ten years ago. I no longer remember whose review or what list prompted me to add this book. (But thank you, whoever you were! I really liked it!) I had this book on my TBR so long that it almost didn’t make it through several TBR purges. I distinctly remember being on the verge of deleting it at least twice, and then […]

‘Are we talking about one body or two?’ Nilson replied, ‘Fifteen or sixteen, since 1978.’

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In February 1983, the residents of 23 Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill started having problems with their drains. Calling out a plumber, the blockage would turn out to be much, much worse than the usual toilet blockages, as well as accounting for the terrible smell that had been permeating the house for some time. The resident in the attic flat had been flushing human flesh. Quickly arrested, Dennis Nilsen was extremely forthcoming with the police. As well as immediately copping to having bodies hid in […]

I’ve seen the future, brother. It is murder.

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As anyone with even the vaguest idea of my reading habits will have noticed, I’m fascinated by true crime – and serial killers in particular. I can’t tell you why that is (although I’ve read lots of theories about why women, and in particular women with anxiety, are so drawn to the subject), but what I can tell you is that Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters is an excellent book on the history of serial killing, the psychopathology of these types of […]



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