Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Break your silence if you would/before the sun goes down for good

The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James

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It’s 1982, and small-town Viv has big-city ambitions. Mostly, she just wants to get out of the town where she has lived all her life; she has a vague ambition to move to New York and become an actress, so off she goes in spite of her mother’s protestations. One dodgy hitchhiker later and she ends up at the Sun Down Motel, a run down establishment in the town of Fell, New York. The hotel manager offers her free board in exchange for running the […]

(Fictional) True Crime Dual Timeline

The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James

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Split between Fell New York, 1982 and Fell New York, 2017 the story follows two women (Viv in 1982 and Carly, Viv’s niece in 2017).  Viv goes missing in 1982, leaving Carly, the niece she never knew with a family mystery on her hands.  Carly goes to Fell in search of her aunt and takes a job working at the same Motel (the Sun Down Motel of the title) her aunt was at before she vanished.  She ends up working the same shift her aunt […]

Hitchhiking Once Again is a Dangerous Game

Murder Road by Simone St. James

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Murder Road by Simone St. James is a supernatural mystery/thriller and I’ll be honest I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it.  I read it in one day, so that says I wasn’t bored or distracted by it, but I also was left feeling a little “well …”  So for me, it’s a solid three-star read.  Fun, did its job by entertaining me but all felt a little … ephemeral at the end. Set in 1995, the story follows newlyweds April and Eddie who […]

50’s Noir Anyone?

Ghost 19 by Simone St. James

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If The Woman in the Window and the Exorcism of Sara May had a baby, it might be something like Ghost 19…something like. I haven’t actually read the Woman in the Window, but I saw the movie with Amy Adams and then I saw the even better The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window with Kristen Bell, so I know what I’m talking about.Hear me out. We have a woman…who is afraid to leave her house…who watches the […]

More Like the Book of Old Cases, Right?

The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James

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Le sigh. I hate tearing into the work of a writer I normally enjoy. I’m going to do a non-spoiler one and include a spoiler below. While the spoiler does indeed reveal a major plot point (though not an essential one to the mystery of the murders), I do encourage you to read it as it deals with a trope that is common and very painful for a large group of people. It’s one I see repeated time-and-time again and I’m just tired of it. […]

“But a novel always ends, the lies come to the surface, and the deaths are explained. Maybe one of the bad characters gets away with something—that’s fashionable right now—but you are still left with a sense that things are balanced, that dark things come to light, and that the bad person will, at least, most likely be miserable.”

The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James

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This book lit my brain up like a Christmas tree. Nobody knows why certain books hit certain people like they do. That’s part of the magic of art, and of reading. But it worked for me in individual pieces, and it worked as a whole. During parts of it, I could practically hear my synapses yelling far off in the distance a gleeful “wheeeee”. So, here are all the individual components that got me: *The main character, Shea, reads mystery and crime fiction, and reads […]



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