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:

The One Where I Don’t Like What I Think I Will Like

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

Perfect Prey by Helen Fields

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The Thursday Murder Club (Richard Osman) ** Perfect Prey (Helen Fields) ***½  Somewhere, in a very British and very sedate retirement village, a group of seniors get together in the jigsaw room where they solve unsolved crimes. They’re pushing eighty, they have opinions on which type of cake is better (walnut). They are Ron (former commie rabblerouser, scourge of the Thatcher era), Elizabeth (former detective with a fantabulous past full of the sort of intrigue James Bond could only have dreamed of), Ibrahim (former psychiatrist […]

Digging Deep

The Night Shift by Alex Finlay

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New Jersey, New Year’s Eve 1999. A skeleton crew – four high school girls and their only slightly older manager – work the graveyard shift at a Blockbuster’s. The girls gossip and skirt their duty. Their manager – kindly, wearily and ineffectively – tries to get them to do their jobs, but the girl’s aren’t having it. Hours later they are all found dead. Only the youngest of them, Ella Monroe, survives. A suspect is quickly found but he flees before anyone can catch him.  […]

Lost the Plot

Lost by Michael Robotham

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On an otherwise unremarkable night, London detective Vincent Ruiz finds himself desperately clinging to a buoy in the river Thames, bleeding out from a brutal gunshot wound to his leg. When he finally wakes up in hospital a few days later his memory of the events leading up to that night are gone. His superiors are pissed at him and all Vince knows is that something went horribly wrong. Why was he in the Thames? Why is his hospital room being guarded? And why was […]

Topsy Turvy

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

Perfect Remains (Luc Callanach #1) by Helen Fields

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How, exactly, do you decide whether the book you’ve just read is good? I can appreciate books that I struggled my way through, and I’ve torn my way through books that I hated. Clearly enjoyment is one factor and reward is another, but the two books I’ve read in the past week or so kind of threw me for a loop. One of them is right up my wheelhouse. The other, not so much. Yet I ended up loving the latter and disliking the former […]

Faye & Felix & Sage & Dreamcatchers

Stolen Tongues by Felix Blackwell

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Faye and Felix are both hardworking young professionals – she as an assistant at the local zoo, he as an English lit PhD – so like any couple, they jump at the chance to stay at Faye’s parents’ cottage deep in the Rocky Mountains for a few days. At first, all appears to be well; the cottage is charming and comfortable, and the trails leading off the back of the cottage up the mountain are beckoning them. But soon things go awry. Voices call out […]

Murder, Mayhem and Meatballs

Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix

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On a dark night, three people come together to discover who has been vandalising their store: reluctant but cash-strapped Amy, pleasant but lonely Ruth Anne and manager Basil, whose corporate hard-on is probably the most terrifying thing in this book. The store they work at is Orsk, a wannabe Ikea chain of cheap DIY furniture stores (Ikea is acknowledged as the superior brand here but really, for all intents and purposes, Orsk IS Ikea). It doesn’t take long for things to go awry: a mysterious […]



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