Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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 […]

An excellent, atmospheric Australian mystery and family drama.

The Lost Man by Jane Harper

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This is my favorite of Jane Harper’s four books. The setting is outrageous, and such a good place for something like this to go down, even more so because it’s a real place in the actual world and not, like, an alien planet or something. This is some ‘the year 2133 on Mars’ kind of shit, except it’s now and it’s Australia. I just couldn’t get over how they all live on this giant plot of land as big as my state, and our main […]

The Players and the Game

The Rage by Gene Kerrigan

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This is billed for fans of The Wire and I totally get that. I always think that Wire-like books are ones similar to George Pelecanos novels, books I admire more than enjoy. This is one such work. There is a lot to admire about this one. Gene Kerrigan’s prose is smooth and he definitely understands Recession Era Ireland. I got a good sense of what happened over there and how it affected everyone from the moneymakers to the lower class. The set ups to all of the crimes […]

Atmospheric, dark, and lovely

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

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[Read as an ebook from the local library] Books like this generally don’t hit my radar. I do love well executed historical fiction, but as you might know from reading my review of The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, I’m not a Dickens person. Victorian England is not my particular wheelhouse. But I do like Korean film, and The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook’s sumptuous 2016 film, follows the initial plot of this book relatively closely, so I was curious to read the original. Because this is […]

Not an actual Guidebook

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson

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As somone who grew up reading Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie, I love a good mystery.  If I had it to do again, I would definitely have chosen the audiobook for this since it has such strong Serial podcast vibes. In Fairview a beautiful and popular senior, Andie Bell, was murdered five years ago by her boyfriend, Sal Singh, who then killed himself.  The tragedy has haunted this small town and the people who knew the families involved.  Now five years later, 17 year old Pip […]

“Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone can do anything.”

The Searcher by Tana French

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This was slower paced and less twisty-turny than her other books but I loved that about it. I liked her last book, The Witch Elm, but I loved this one. This is also a character study as well as a mystery/crime novel (that isn’t part of her Dublin Murder series), but here the protagonist is a former cop from Chicago who retired and decided to try and find peace in the Irish countryside. He bought a beaten down farmhouse and has spent a lot of […]



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