Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I disagree. If a feeling knocks and no one answers, it’ll get p[EXPLICIT]d off. It’ll kick the door in, chuck the gift at you and smash your best ornaments so you don’t disrespect it again. You’ll be clearing up a lot more mess than you had to start with. So it’s good, Maxine, to cry if you want. Remember that.”

The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett

by Leave a Comment

I might have to go lower my rating for The Appeal based on how much more I liked this one. The premise is once again based on a unique format; this time instead of being told through emails, we’ve got audio recordings made on an old iPhone 4 by a man just out of an eleven year prison stint. The difference between her first book and this one, aside from being more elaborate, is that here we have characters to emotionally connect to. In The Appeal, the format […]

Murder of the Week

A Twist of a Knife by Anthony Horowitz

by 2 Comments

I was a touch disappointed in Anthony Horowitz’s last Hawthorne mystery, so I started The Twist of a Knife with my expectations tempered. I love Horowitz’s two Atticus Pünd novels (Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders), and I suspect I’ve been judging the Hawthorne series a little too harshly because of that. I still enjoy them, though, for what they are: light-hearted, fun mysteries that read like episodes of your favorite murder-of-the-week television series. The Twist of the Knife is an entertaining installment. When the novel […]

“It is a profound belief of mine that if you can induce a person to talk to you for long enough, on any subject whatever, sooner or later they will give themselves away.”

After the Funeral (Hercule Poirot, #26) by Agatha Christie

by 5 Comments

I had a really good time with this one, and the mystery in this one was actually one of the most intriguing of hers to me, even though it isn’t one of her most popular. I’m not sure why it’s one of her more lowly-rated ones. Maybe because Poirot pulls a Marple and is barely in it? The plot in this one kicks off as family patriarch Richard Abernethie’s funeral. He was ill for a long time, but had been predicted to live at least […]

“At one point he brushed my hand and there was electricity, but I think that was the combination of the deep carpet outside the restaurant and my new cardigan.”

The Bullet That Missed (The Thursday Murder Club, #3) by Richard Osman

by Leave a Comment

I don’t know how much more I can continue to say about these books, as my love for them is not diminishing but only growing, and the books are so consistent with what I love about them, I don’t want to just be saying the same things every time a new one is published. But I guess I’m going to anyway! Sorry. But not really. Our four septuagenarians are still at it, solving murders on Thursdays, and hopefully things have calmed down after the chaos […]

“You’ve done enough poking around, this is getting stupid. You’re not some kind of pregnant Miss Marple.”

The It Girl by Ruth Ware

by 4 Comments

It was perfectly fine! But I still don’t get the Ruth Ware obsession that some people have. Our “It Girl” is April Coutts-Cliveden, who is murdered her freshman year at Oxford, and who had “that thing”. The main character and narrator is her roommate and “best friend”, Hannah, who has experienced ten years of PTSD and harassment from journalists and the public because she was the one who found April’s body, and it was her testimony that sealed the conviction of the murderer, John Neville, […]

This Series Is Growing On Me

The Private Patient by P. D. James

by 2 Comments

cbr14 series This is the second Adam Dalgleish mystery by James I’ve read now, and I do enjoy the set-up.  Essentially, it’s a closed box mystery, a la Agatha Christie, where you know that the perpetrator is one of a certain set of suspects, and the fun is figuring out who.  The Commander in charge, Dalgleish, has a couple of subordinates as his team, and they are called in only for high profile hush-hush cases.  Nothing happens overnight, for they are dealing with wealthy and […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo