Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“You’ll find that what you can bear increases a great deal when you are not offered any other choice.”

The Bone Orchard by Sara A. Mueller

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Mistress Charm is a witch, maybe, and a madam certainly. She presides over Orchard House, a brothel/social club catering to Borengard’s most wealthy and powerful. The eponymous orchard is filled with bone trees, which fruit can be animated into living creatures. Mistress Charm is also mistress to the Emperor, who visits every Tuesday. When the Emperor is poisoned, he charges Charm with finding (and killing) those responsible for his death. This book is so densely plotted and detailed that it took me quite a while […]

OK I may have over-estimated Odd Thomas filling the Bosch void in my life

Forever Odd (Odd Thomas #2) by Dean Koontz

Brother Odd (Odd Thomas #3) by Dean Koontz

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I had a great reaction to the first Odd Thomas book.  I did not love this book.  By the end of the book I was listening to the audiobook at like 1.6x.  This is pretty fast.  I basically hated it and wanted it to be over! At the start of this book Odd is awoken by his recently dead neighbor, who is a doctor with a stepson Odd’s age.  The son is missing, and the rest of the book is basically Odd trying to find […]

The Past Is Not Dead (neither am I)

The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay

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Not my first read of the year, but it is my first CBR14 review! I’ve got a couple dozen other reads that I’ll get around to reviewing soon. I received this ARC in a Goodreads Giveaway (my first! what a hell of a book for a first ARC!). It has not impacted the content of my review. Art Barbara (not his real name, but it sounds anti-cool, don’t you think?) meets Mercy Brown (also not her real name) in 1988 at the second meeting of […]

As It Says on the Tin . . .

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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OK, let’s start off with Rebecca, but then go off on The Yellow Wallpaper and now cross it with Lovecraft/Eldritch horror (sans tentacles, fortunately).  Sound like fun? Yes, it was, and especially because of the heroine.  Very much mid-century modern, wealthy Mexican socialite Noemi Taboada has grown quite bored with her social scene.  A budding interest in anthropology aside, her life seems to be one party after another, one fatuous twit after another. So when her father receives a plea for help from her cousin […]

Grab bag of goodness!

Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Wendy, Darling by A.C. Wise

Cat Chaser by Elmore Leonard

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I’m starting to get behind so I’m going with the group review format. I didn’t know how to do this until now so I’m hoping this saves my season when my laziness/procrastination (fine, its mostly because of Elden Ring) prevents me from getting my reviews written. These are three books that are very different in genre, but all quite good and recommended.   Malibu catches fire. It is simply what Malibu does from time to time. Tornadoes take the flatlands of the Midwest. Floods rise […]

A wide variety of horror from Lovecraftian to historically inspired

Dark Stars by John F.D. Taff

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I’ve said it before, but I love anthologies for the opportunity to speed date a variety of authors. While I’ve been reading more horror lately, it’s not a genre where I’m familiar with a lot of authors, so I jumped on the chance to read this anthology. In that respect, it was a complete success as I found several new authors! “In classes, I was often told that, according to Henry James, my taste for the works of Edgar Allan Poe was ‘the mark of […]



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