Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Why is this Man Mad?

Understudy for Death by Charles Willeford

by Leave a Comment

Read as part of CBR14Bingo: font. The book is told from the perspective of a journalist. Several times throughout the novel, the font of the novel will change when an article that the journalist or someone else writes is inserted in the story.  It’s going to be tough to squeeze 250 words out of here but I’ll try. I was planning on dumping this with my end-of-the-month reads but it checked the “font” box off CBR Bingo so… Charles Willeford loves writing about domesticity. And while he’s […]

Mailing It In

Pick-Up by Charles Willeford

by Leave a Comment

I don’t know what really to make of Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up in 250 words. It’s a good book but having seen another book do the same trick the author does here, and more effectively in my opinion, it’s tough to really have sentiments about it. On the one hand, the tale itself is interesting on face value before the last two sentences. A familiar noir fable of two losers playing out the string. The art angle is interesting as Willeford’s art fascination is not something you see […]

Losing His Religion

The Black Mass of Brother Springer by Charles Willeford

by Leave a Comment

The Black Mass of Brother Springer is a tough book to classify…or even recommend. A biting satire of organized religion, a send up of civil rights through the white gaze, a testimony on the consequences of fragile masculinity. There’s a lot going on here for such a short book. The book’s writer Charles Willeford is one of my favorites. He writes crime novels with a unique voice that’s tough to compare. No less than Quentin Tarantino has said that Willeford is the biggest literary inspiration for […]

Ugh, Dad, You’re Embarrassing Me…

The Way We Die Now by Charles Willeford

by Leave a Comment

And so I have come to the end of Charles Willeford’s Hank Moseley series which, while at times was quite entertaining, mostly disappointed me after its great entry (Miami Blues). As I said in my reviews of the last two books, I expected more cat-and-mouse affairs with Moseley and criminals. I didn’t think this would be a series about a sad sack cop’s private life with some police bureaucracy and a little detective work thrown in. That’s mostly what these books are. And while I’ve […]

Home Improvement

Sideswipe by Charles Willeford

by Leave a Comment

Alan Sepinwall, my favorite TV critic, has a running gag in his columns where he talks about how he’d like to see a character from whatever show he’s reviewing have a spin-off where they do banal tasks relational to the character’s motives. My personal favorite was the suggestion that goofy Justified gangster Wynn Duffy get a series called Wynnipeg in which he gets continually frustrated at teaching Canadians how to be criminals. At any rate, three books into the Hoke Moseley series and I feel like this one, as well […]

Family Matters

by Leave a Comment

I discovered Charles Willeford’s work last year and he’s become one of my favorite crime writers. Cockfighter was the best crime book I read in 2017 and his first Hank Moseley story Miami Blues will be chalked up to one of the best I’ve read this year. A raucous tale of the worst cat-and-mouse game ever played between cop and criminal. Willeford has a skill for three-dimensional characters, good-but-not-flashy dialogue, wry humor, and measured cynicism. All of those are on display for New Hope for the Dead, a book […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo