Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I understand why people like these books; I’m just not one of them

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

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Hastings is on leave from military service during World War 1. He is staying with an old acquaintance, John Kavendish, at the estate at Styles. It is not Kavendish’s house or property but that of his step-mother Emily Inglethorp who has proven to be a very generous benefactor of the war efforts. Also staying at Styles is Mary, John’s wife, Lawrence, John’s brother, Cynthia, the daughter of family friends whose parents recently passed, Dorcas, the maid, Evelyn, a friend of Emily’s, and most scandalously, Alfred, […]

Reading, Reading, Reading

Broken Places by Tracy Clark

The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie

Solos by Kitty Burns Florey

The Lady Upstairs by Halley Sutton

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Finishing off the year right with another round of great crime fiction… Broken Places 4 stars A really good debut novel that’s pure Chicago without being annoying. A little predictable towards the end but well-written nonetheless. Also, much love for featuring black Roman Catholicism, which is a different expression than the commonly mass produced (re:white) Roman Catholicism of crime novels and movies.   The A.B.C. Murders 4 stars This one was about to highlight why I’m not a big Christie fan, despite usually enjoying her novels. Whereas […]

Poirot Knows

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

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From time-to-time, I like to read a random Agatha Christie. As perhaps the greatest whodunnit writer of all-time, Christie keeps me sharp as a writer, even if I’m not especially a fan of whodunnits. I grabbed this one randomly from my local library, assuming that at any moment, my state will have a stay-at-home order and I’ll have to hunker down again with books. That hasn’t happened…yet. But when I had space over the weekend to get to this one, I was excited to do […]

“You tell your lies and you think nobody knows. But there are two people who know. Yes – two people. One is le bon Dieu – and the other is Hercule Poirot.”

The Mystery of the Blue Train (Hercule Poirot, #6) by Agatha Christie

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This one wasn’t my favorite, though I liked it quite a bit by the end. I had a hard time at first getting a handle on the arc of the story, and Poirot doesn’t come in until about chapter ten, so there are just a bunch of POV characters you’re introduced to before you have any context for why they’re important to the story. I fully realize this is a technique employed by many books I have enjoyed in the past, but there was something […]

Behold…

The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie

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I’m not an Agatha Christie expert. She’s an excellent writer, quite talented at setting up clever, puzzle box mysteries. But as I’ve said countless times, the whodunnit has never interested me much. I’m more interested in the whydunnit. I do believe aspiring mystery writers need to read her in order to hone their craft. But I’m not a diehard. The English countryside whodunnit really isn’t my thing. However, I saw this one was a standalone (the only recurring character is a mystery novelist one that […]

Guinness book of world records, record for least Miss Marple in a Miss Marple book.

The Moving Finger (Miss Marple, #4) by Agatha Christie

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This was fun, but it felt much less like a whodunit than I wanted it to, and Miss Marple came in late to the story even for Miss Marple. I think it may be a record of some sort, how little and how late she was in this book (and her parts were the best parts). Our narrator is actually Jerry Barton, a man who has moved to the small village of Lymstock on the advice of his doctor. Jerry is recovering from a plane […]



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