Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“This killer was just herself turned inside out. Her fatal inversion.”

Deadly Animals by Marie Tierney

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. This is a slow, quiet, dark book. Don’t go in expecting anything in your face. It actually took me a bit to become emotionally into, but this turned out to be worth the wait. I just had to get in the right headspace. That said, it does feel like something is lacking for me, that ineffable thing, that would make this a five star read. I’m not sure […]

“Tea had featured heavily in the past fortnight. Miriam sometimes felt her belly sloshing with it, like a waterbed”

Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner

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Scandal – a very British scandal, stiff upper lip, what will the neighbors say? I stumbled across Susie Steiner, the author of the DS Manon Bradshaw series, when I read of her death, July 2nd, in the Guardian (and, by the way, this is an enjoyable obituary, if an obituary can be said to be ‘enjoyable’! https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jul/13/susie-steiner-obituary). Steiner was a former journalist who lived with retinitis pigmentosa and succumbed, at the very premature age of 51, to brain cancer. The obituary notes that Ms. Steiner […]

Surprised by an oldie

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

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[Read as an audiobook from the public library] I hesitated to add this one because it’s just so old, but I honestly enjoyed it when I listened to it in January and it kicked off a good fit of audiobook consumption so I thought, might as well. My real introduction to Agatha Christie came with Phoebe Judge’s Phoebe Reads a Mystery podcast, when she read The Mysterious Affair at Styles. I have a collection of Christie mysteries knocking around the house somewhere, but I could […]

Second time through, the characters make this just as good.

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The thing about entirely plot-based books is that they don’t usually make for good re-reads, and I am a TOTAL book re-reader. “Do I want to re-read this someday?” is genuinely a question I ask before I will elevate a book to the four star level. If the answer is no, then there better be some damn fine extenuating circumstances as to why not (for instance a book that’s really good, but so traumatizing and upsetting that you can’t read it more than once). Mysteries sometimes […]

“People in the dark are quite different, aren’t they?”

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Once again guessed the murderer by complete accident. I’m the mystery reader equivalent of those characters you often see in farces who are complete idiots (usually lovable) and bumble about doing everything so wrong they come back around and get everything right. I really enjoyed this book, which was apparently Christie’s 50th (although publishers had to count a book of short stories to make this true, and they really wanted to, because publicists never change). It starts out kind of like a game. An ad […]

A Change of Pace for a Formulaic Genre

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Unfortunately, not like my previous review of Dead Men Don’t Ski, there were not a lot of wonderfully on-the-nose covers of this book to choose from.  The one from Amazon is the same as my copy, which is lacking in over the top death melodrama.  (Although this is the first time [out of all of two books of hers I read] that a big clue was printed on the cover.) Another first is the narration perspective.  Instead of following Detective Harry Tibbett on his investigations, […]



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