Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Indigenous family demons

White Horse by Erika T. Wurth

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White Horse intrigued me with its mysterious cover. It follows Kari, an indigenous woman living in Colorado who is haunted by her past. Or rather her lack of a past because her mother disappeared shortly after she was born. Her dad was stricken by grief and ended up in a car accident. Kari spent much of her life resenting her mom and being a caretaker. After some struggles with drugs, she has gotten her life together.  She hangs with her best friend and cousin Debby, […]

“Literarily speaking,” he said, and proceeded to lecture. Christie, he contended, was overrated. More of a popular author.

Last Word to the Wise by Ann Claire

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Ellie and Meg Christie, sisters and co-owners of the Book Chalet, have been winkled into testing out their cousin’s new matchmaking service. Ellie’s date is odious, but Meg hits it off with hers – until it seems like he’s stood her up for brunch the next day. Except it turns out that Joe Darcy is actually dead, and Meg is at the top of the suspect list. This is the second book in the Christie Bookshop Mystery series, a new cozy mystery series. I read […]

Ornery Agatha Cat Christie

Dead and Gondola by Ann Claire

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Ellie and her sister Meg are the latest managers of their family-owned bookstore. When an employee disappears and a mysterious visitor ends up dead in a gondola, the Christies find themselves entangled in the mystery. My losing streak had apparently ended, because I adored this book! It had all the best traits of a cozy mystery – quirky characters, a small town feel, adorable animals – without going overboard, which is a real hazard in this genre. The Christies are a fun, close-knit family, bookstore […]

Dying for Brain Candy? A cozy fine mystery series.

Dying for Chocolate (A Goldy Bear Culinary Mystery, #2) by Diane Mott Davidson

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I really don’t want to write 250 pages about this, but I’ll give it a whirl. This book was fine and the series is fine and I’ll probably keep reading them but they aren’t setting the world on fire, just a cozy mystery series. Goldy Bear is a caterer in somewhere Colorado raising her son, tangling with her abusive ass of an ex-husband, and of course, being also tangled up with people who die under mysterious circumstances. Tangled is a good word for this book […]

Pam Houston is my Weakness

Deep Creek - Finding Hope in the High Country by Pam Houston

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About twenty-five years ago, I remember picking up a short story collection called Cowboys are my Weakness and falling in love with Pam Houston’s writing.  Though the characters and contexts she wrote about were far different from the world I was navigating in the Twin Cities post-college, I still felt a strong connection to the stories and emotions they created. Flash forward several decades and I’m listening to Pam Houston read aloud the piece, “The Season of Hunkering Down” from her newest book, Deep Creek […]

Starring Kojak, formerly known as Big Steve, a Very Good Dog

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My blossoming love affair with Stephen King continues, with yet another behemoth of awesomeness: The Stand. This particular edition was released in 1990, twelve years after the first release. It was updated and expanded, and I have no reference to the first edition but, according to “Publisher’s Weekly,” at least as quoted on amazon.com, “The same excellent tale of the walking dude, the chemical warfare weapon called superflu and the confrontation between its survivors has been updated to 1990, so references to Teenage Mutant Ninja […]



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