Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Hot Priest Plus Actual Witch? OK, I’m Here For It.

The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

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I have a new favorite niche – Mexican Gothic.  Actually this genre and I go way back to my high school days.  I was in Spanish III, junior year, and we read Doña Barbara by Romulo Gallego, written in 1929.  OK, it was actually a Venezuelan novel rather than Mexican, but I suspect the landed gentry in those two countries were not all that different back in those days.  Of course, my Spanish was still fledgling, so what was going on was frequently a mystery, […]

“Home is a choice and sometimes a hard one. What you choose to accept. What you embrace.”

Lute by Jennifer Marie Thorne

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Nina Treadway is the lady of Lute, but she’s only lived there for seven years, since she got married to Hugh. As a foreigner, she doesn’t believe in the island’s day of the tithe, but as things start going wrong all around her, she wonders if it might be more than a superstition. Folk horror! A mysterious day of human sacrifice as an island extracts the price of its bounty from its residents! An American abroad! And that cover is so very beautiful, and so […]

Medieval Armageddon

Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman

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This was…not the book I was expecting. I figured it would just be three people questing their way through medieval horror episodes. And it is that. The thing is: the horror is taking place during the bubonic plague, which has also apparently opened a portal to hell freeing the demons to do cosmic battle with the angels…hence the horrors on earth. Yeah this book is a lot. And it’s really good. The three main characters are cyphers for the larger story Christopher Buehlman is trying […]

Sigh…Vampires

No Dominion by Charlie Huston

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On Goodreads, there is a reviewer named Kemper (an alias). He has since retired, which is a shame because I love his reviews. He enjoys a lot of the same crime fiction I do. Anyway, Kemper had this tic I once found annoying in that he would write reviews by doing faux interviews with the authors of the books he read. He usually did this when he read something that wasn’t so good. I preferred reading his regular reviews. However, as I’ve written so many […]

November 2023 Leftovers

Catch and Release by Lawrence Block

We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba

The League: How Five Rivals Created the NFL and Launched an Empire by John Eisenberg

Ghosts of West Baltimore by David Simmons

Mob Star: The Story of John Gotti by Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci

Hit Me by Lawrence Block

Donnie Brasco by Joseph D. Pistone

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Happy Thanksgiving to all who observe! Catch and Release *** Been angling to read more LB lately so I figured I’d knock out this short story collection for my monthly HCC read. Sadly, the results were predictable: a repetition of serial killers, hit men and un-sexy sex. I just can’t sink my teeth into books featuring short stories and this one was no exception. I enjoyed visiting Matt and Mick at Grogan’s again and the last story was fun but beyond that? Who lotta eh and […]

Jekyll and Hyde

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

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Althought I had never read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I thought I had a basic understanding of the storyline about a man who through a series of events creates a split personality within himself, one good and one evil. Imagine my surprise when I actually read this book and I discovered I was very wrong about most of this story, and my understanding of what it was about was heavily influenced by the Jekyll and Hyde musical. There is no […]



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