Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Going to San Francisco

The White Van by Patrick Hoffman

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Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: red cover And so I now come full circle to Patrick Hoffman’s catalog. Hoffman is a quality over quantity writer. Every 3-4 years, we are gifted with a new book of his that functions as a soup-to-nuts examination of how criminal justice works in America. A massive drug shipment in Every Man a Menace. Corporate espionage in Clean Hands. The war against white supremacists in Friends Helping Friends, which came out this year and is one of the best things I’ve read in 2025. […]

“I would shiver the whole night through”

Knife River (2024) by Justine Champine

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When it comes to mysteries, I find the plot to be almost the least interesting thing–as long as it’s not too lazy or derivative or actively insulting to the reader, and fits into the vibes of the story. What I do care about, then, are the vibes–if the vibes are there, if the texture of the story is something I can snag myself on, I don’t really worry about clues or reveals (which I’m bad at predicting anyway). The vibes are pretty immaculate in Knife […]

The Women Come and Go

Insidious Intent (Tony Hill&Carol Jordan #10) by Val McDermid

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A car is set ablaze in a lay-by in the rural north of England. Initially, it is thought that it was left there by a couple of carjackers trying to dispose of it, but upon closer inspection, the body of a dead woman is found inside. Police inspector Carol Jordan, head of a newly minted major crimes unit covering several large cities in the north, investigates the crime and with the help of her friend, criminal psychologist Tony Hill, she tries to stop the killer […]

Irish Goodbye

Everybody Dies by Lawrence Block

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When I first read Everybody Dies a few years ago, I found it disappointing. Matt partnering with his gangster friend Mick Ballou sounded like fun but the execution was meh. Block used it as an excuse to kill off a lit of auxiliary characters from previous books, while the killer himself wasn’t especially interesting and I didn’t feel like I understood Ballou’s character more than I already did. So I wasn’t really jazzed to go back to it for my Scudder re-read, which is almost complete. But […]

Follow the nursery rhyme

Keisari Seisoo Palatsissaan (The Emperor Stands in His Palace) (1971) by Eeva Tenhunen

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Bingo square ‘Golden’: A famous author’s literary legacy looms large–and lucrative.  It is criminal that the work of Eeva Tenhunen (1937-2017) is out of print and untranslated. Described in her day (she published her novels between 1964 and 1987) as ‘Finland’s Agatha Christie’, you can see the influence of the English Golden Age of detective fiction: a country house and its rituals, a disruptive outsider, and a seething bubbling crucible of familial and marital tensions, class and political differences, and deep dark secrets. Tenhunen swaps […]

To The Moon

Love You More by Lisa Gardner

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Here’s something funny: as evidenced by a thousand hammy postcards and Live Laugh Love-adjacent signs, Love you to the moon and back is a term of endearment in English. In Dutch, however, if you want to tell someone to fuck off, you tell them to walk to the moon. I’m not sure what that says about us as a people, but I was reminded of the duality by Gardner’s Love You More. Not because it involves either linguistics of astronomy, but because there’s an inherent […]



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