Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Zirza

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I am an English teacher from the Low Countries. Like everyone else I aspire to one day write a Booker Prize Winner, but until then I contend my self with reading stuff and writing about it. I try to keep the bitchiness to a minimum, but sometimes I can't help myself. In my spare time I enjoy complaining about the weather and sleeping. I lack the attention span for good books and the tolerance for bad ones. I am stuck in literary purgatory. Hey, at least it's warm here.

Zirza's Reviews:

Murder Misery

This is Why We Lied by Karin Slaughter

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Newlyweds Sara (forensic pathologist) and Will (GBI agent) have decided to splurge on their honeymoon; they’ve rented a cabin at the exclusive McAlpine lodge, deep in the Appalachian Mountains, for a week of horseback riding, fishing, mountain biking and – as is made abundantly clear – loads of steamy sex. But because this a Karin Slaughter novel and somehow everything always has to tie into the character’s personal lives, during their first night, Mercy McAlpine, the resort’s manager, is found dead.  First of all: Mercy […]

Gone, but not forgotten

Exiles by Jane Harper

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On a warm spring night, during a busy festival in South Australia’s wine region, a six week old baby sleeps in her pram. Her mother is nowhere to be seen.  A year on, Kim Gillespie is still nowhere to be found. Investigator Aaron Falk, who works for Australia’s financial crimes department, heads down to old friends for the baptism of their young son, but as he meets their extended group of relatives, friends and acquaintances, he starts to be drawn into the mystery. It can […]

Holiday Reads Part Deux, because I apparently read better in a tent

Craven Manor by Darcy Coates

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carré

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Craven Manor (Darcy Coates) *** Daniel is down on his luck. He’s a decent guy (this is made abundantly clear) but the only thing keeping him from homelessness is his slob of a cousin. One day, a letter is pushed underneath the door of Daniel’s apartment, mysteriously offering him a job on a mysterious manor that Daniel has never seen even though he grew up in the town. With great trepidation, he makes his way over to Craven Manor, an abandoned home in the middle […]

Chilling.

Snow by John Banville

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It’s impossible for me to review this novel without providing SPOILERS, so read at your own peril.  Rural Ireland, 1957. Detective St. John Strafford (with an R) has been summoned to a country estate in the south-east of Ireland, where a Catholic priest has been found dead in the house of a Protestant land owner. The real kicker: the priest has been castrated. It’s December and the countryside is cloaked in a thick blanket of snow that chokes out sound and hides evidence. Under the […]

Campsite Reads

The Alewives by Elizabeth R. Andersen

Lock Every Door by Riley Sager

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We took a brief holiday over the Ascension Day weekend, and because my kids didn’t really want to leave the campsite I got the chance to catch up on my reading. I finished three books. The third one deserves its own review, but I grouped the other two together. The Alewives (Elizabeth R. Anderson) **  In the Middle Ages, in the tannery district of the Alsation town of Colmar, four women team up to brew ale, bemoan their useless and/or dead husbands, and solve crimes. […]

Resounding Meh.

Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier

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After the death of her mother, twenty three year old Mary Yellan has little choice but to sell off her family’s farm and move in with her sole living relative, Aunt Patience. Mary hasn’t seen her aunt in years and thus has no idea what to expect when she travels to the remote Jamaica Inn, buried deep in the Cornwall Countryside. The coach driver who takes her there tells her the Inn has a bad reputation, but won’t say much more, though Mary soon understands […]



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