Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

By Order of the Pious Bleeping Men!

Priest of Bones by Peter McLean

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I think Peter McLean might owe the Peaky Blinders creators some money. To be clear: I don’t mind! I like Peaky Blinders. I found this book on a list of books to read if you like Peaky Blinders. This is absolutely Peaky Blinders set in a fantasy world. Brothers running a gang in a crap part of a crap city. Men returning from war ridden with PTSD. A nosy aunt who tries to keep the business afloat. A rival gang vying for control of the […]

All in…

The Family by Naomi Krupitsky

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This book has received a lot of comparisons to Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and the other works in that series. Let me clarify: I’ve tried to read Ferrante multiple times and just can’t land with her writing. I don’t know what it is. It’s got nothing to do with my months-long slump; I can’t connect with it. So I’ve heard a lot of people dismiss The Family because it’s a comparison that doesn’t measure up for them. If you’re a big Ferrante fan, you should know that going […]

The Departed

At End of Day by George V. Higgins

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Been reading a lot of Boston crime novels lately so it made sense for me to finally circle back to George V. Higgins’ final work. My journey with Higgins is an interesting one. I first read The Friends of Eddie Coyle ten years ago and while I thought it was good, I really had no idea how to appreciate. Its dialogue-heavy approach with a large heap of verisimilitude made me feel like I was reading transcripts of a conversation between gangsters and cops rather than a typical […]

Generational Trauma

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

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“Will anything save me from this months-long reading slump I’m in?” so I cried. Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice came close but I think that was largely due to the fact that I haven’t read many stories set in India so I didn’t know the familiar tips and tricks Stateside writers do. Aside from that one, I’ve read a lot of good stuff this year but I’ve also quit a lot because…well I don’t know the “because.” Have my standards gotten higher? Am I just tired of […]

Spain and Not Plain

The Queen of the South by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

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I’ve been slumping lately due to stress at work and have mostly been hewing to light fiction (see Daisy Darker). I didn’t expect to connect with Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s literary crime novel when cycling through what I wanted to read next but the writing hooked me from page one and away we went. This is an interesting book. It’s good, very good. I’m not sure it’s great but I don’t want to dwell on that. I’ll focus on what I liked: it’s absolutely a retelling in some […]

California Soul-less

Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper

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Much like Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice, this is an early 2023 novel that came with a ton of hype. Being a big crime fiction fan, I’ve been hearing about this book for months, not just from publishers who make it their job, but from other mystery writers. It was billed as the modern day Chinatown, the new age Los Angeles noir. I knew I’d probably enjoy it but wasn’t sure if it could live up to its lofty billing. It did. Oh my, it did. What […]



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