Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Even Dame Agatha phoned one in now and then

Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie

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CBR14 BINGO: Elephant, because it’s right there in the name Double BINGO! Diagonal: Snake, Adapt, Star, Bird, Elephant 4 corners and center: Snake, Bodies, Gaslight, Elephant, Star Agatha Christie, why can’t I quit you? Even though I realized in recent years that Christie’s writing was not the great literature I thought it was when I was 12 years old, I still find comfort in the familiar characters and, dang it, even if she doesn’t give you much in the way of character development and dialogue, […]

Toxic Friendships That Lead to Murder

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley

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CBR Bingo: Snakes The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley was the December 2021 Mocha Girls Read book club selection. The theme was “snow on the cover”. I’ve heard a bunch of hype around this book. I am also a sucker for a cozy mystery or a thriller tv show. So I was more than a little intrigued. Everyone is a suspect so this works rather nicely for the “Snakes” square. We meet a group of friends who went to Oxford together and are stuck in […]

“And that very same evening—that very same evening—Lord Edgware dies. Good title that, by the way. Lord Edgware Dies. Look well on a book stall.”

Lord Edgware Dies (Hercule Poirot, #9) by Agatha Christie

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 2 Book 12/30 The ending has made this one of my favorite Christies. You’d think eventually I’d stop being stymied by this woman’s writing, a woman who started writing mysteries a hundred years ago at this point, but it has yet to happen. Maybe I am just terrible at figuring out mysteries, but it’s probably that Christie was just that good. (Or both.) This one started out pretty standard for me. Poirot is called to do something a little […]

A Brit among the cactuses.

Did You See Melody? by Sophie Hannah

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I’m posting my review featuring the British version of the book, which has the original (and MUCH better) title of Did You See Melody? rather than the sanitized and bland as hell US version of Keep Her Safe. YAWN. What were you thinking, US publisher? This is one that’s been on my shelves since spring 2018 when Sophie Hannah came to the Tucson Festival of Books as part of promoting it, and I got to escort her around campus. I’d never read any of her […]

A Do-It-Yourself Mystery.

The Appeal by Janice Hallett

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This was a pretty unique reading experience! I picked it up because of the pretty cover (the American one is shit, so yes I did buy it from the UK) and because it sad ‘Sunday Times Bestseller’ on it, and it’s a mystery. I am basic. (In my defense, the last time I did all of that, I ended up with The Thursday Murder Club, which everyone who loves mysteries should read immediately.) For all y’all Americans, the appeal in question is not a legal […]

Don’t you hate when a book starts out strong only to disappoint you?

The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton

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I so thoroughly enjoyed 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle that I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Stuart Turton’s latest novel, a mystery set aboard a 17th century East Indiaman trade ship sailing from Batavia (now Jakarta) to Amsterdam. Within pages of meeting Sammy Pipps, a detective or “thief-catcher” of Holmesian perception, and his bodyguard/Watson/Boswell Arent Hayes, I was hooked. That’s the difficulty of strong openings: The rest of the novel has to live up to them. Now I’m sadly in the position of […]



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