Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Tidy Little Mystery

Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

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I’m in the process of reading all the Hercule Poirot mysteries, but the waitlist for the ebooks at my library is ridiculously long. When I saw that the first Miss Marple mystery was available as an audiobook, I thought it might be a good choice while I wait. The Murder at the Vicarage audiobook is read almost like a play, with a different person voicing each character, and I thought that might be fun as well. The title pretty much sums up the plot: Colonel […]

Words, madmoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.

The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie

Shake Hands Forever by Ruth Rendell

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The ABC Murders – 4/5 Stars This is a great Agatha Christie novel. It’s from 1936 and it’s one of the earliest detective novels I’ve read that tackles the idea of serial killers, pattern killers etc. Hercule Poirot is called out in a letter challenging him to a kind of mental duel. A killer tells him the location of an upcoming murder and challenges him to stop him. Poirot and Captain Hastings take on the challenge with different mindsets. The first murder is a woman, […]

I did not arrive in time to save my client’s life, but I feel myself bound in honour to discover the assassin.

Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie

Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie

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This is the second ever Hercule Poirot novel, and while I do enjoy him, I not the fan that a lot of people are. I find him really funny and interesting, and because I’ve read Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd which bookend this novel I was really interested in this one. In addition, and I am not a historian at all, so this is purely anti-intellectual speculation, Agatha Christie’s first husband, the Christie of Christie, left her previous to the […]

When It Feels Like It’s Getting Late, I Will Reveal You

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

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As much as I love mysteries, I’ve never really gotten into the classics of the genre. I read And Then There Were None at far too young an age and it scared the absolute crap out of me–that was it for Agatha Christie, up until a few months ago when there was a Kindle sale on Murder on the Orient Express. I read it and thoroughly enjoyed it. Hercule Poirot’s mannerisms tickled me, and I loved the big cast and the bottle episode feel of […]

It often seems to me that’s all detective work is, wiping out your false starts and beginning again.

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

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I feel like this is a beloved book among the many Poirot titles in part because I know it by name in a way that I don’t for many of the others. I liked it well enough, but not as much as many of the many other books in the series or by Agatha Christie in general. For one, I am not sure I like Colonel Race at all. He doesn’t seem to add a lot to the narratives in my perspective and easily could […]

When you read the account of a murder – or, say, a fiction story based on murder – you usually begin with the murder itself. That’s all wrong.

Towards Zero by Agatha Christie

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Agatha Christie does thing sometimes where she is right on the cusp of something truly engaging and even possibly brilliant. But then she pulls back and breaks toward convention. It’s weird. It happened in a later novel Endless Night, where there’s a much richer and interesting novel that the shorter novel acts as an almost blueprint for, a novel not actually written. This books feels like that for me too. If you are going to start the book off with a quote detailing the ways […]



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