Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

An extremely good book. Understatement. #CBRBINGO – Landscape

Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby

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😭😭😭😭😭 Above was my reaction upon finishing this book, which worked its dark magics upon me until my emotions did exactly what it wanted me to do at all times. More on this later. This book also has, I think, the best last line in a novel I’ve read all year. Maybe several years. This book is propulsive and hard to put down. I gave myself almost three days to read it and I read it in half a day. S.A. Cosby, of whom I […]

“He can’t change his past but he means to change his future. He also intends to have his payday. He earned it.”

Billy Summers by Stephen King

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Been sitting on this review, because despite how fast I read the book, I couldn’t quite figure out how I wanted to rate it, or what I wanted to say about it. I think ultimately that I was very entertained by this book, even if it isn’t King’s best. A lot of it revisited past favorite themes of his, but some of it felt new. This is his first straight up crime novel*, and his first about a hit-man. *This honorific used to belong to […]

But You Can’t Take the Neighborhood Out of You

Gravesend by William Boyle

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Read as part of CBR13Bingo: White Whale  And so I circle back to the beginning of William Boyle’s catalog, with his new one Shoot the Moonlight Out already in hand. I tried reading Gravesend multiple times over the years. But it didn’t stick. It reminded me of George Pelecanos’ work, which I admire more than enjoy: character-focused neighborhood-centric stories in which crime just randomly happens and people get drawn in because they can’t escape their circumstances. Those books always sound like fun more than they read like it. At […]

The Devil’s Details

Hit Man by Lawrence Block

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Read as part of CBR13Bingo: Gateway. This is an excellent introduction to Lawrence Block, one of my favorite writers. Also proved an excellent introduction for me to his Keller series.  I really don’t have the words to describe Lawrence Block. It’s an appreciation for him that has grown as I’ve gotten older and my tastes have evolved. In my 20s, I’d look for the pulpy mystery shlock with exciting hooks. Now that I’m older, I appreciate the mundane nature of life and how fictionally exciting […]

One Day in February

The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire by Chloe Hooper

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Australia gets a lot of coverage overseas when it comes to our devastating bushfires. The collective bushfires of January 2020 were especially notable for their sense of apocalypse. But as horrific as the 2020 fires were, the summer of 2009 was even more deadly. February 7 was a particularly devastating day for my home state of Victoria; known as ‘Black Saturday,’ the extreme weather conditions helped fan the flames of over 400 individual fires, killing 173 people, and impacting many, many more. I had friends […]

The Chase Is On

The Heathens by Ace Atkins

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Ace Atkins spent the first ten books of his Quinn Colson series meticulously building up a Walking Tall-like story, parsing out a mythos of fictional Tibbehah County and developing the characters. He dialed it up to a boil in book ten, with big payoffs. Although the stakes are still high for this one, it feels like the beginning of a denouement. Yeah there’s still some background as a player from the past comes back to haunt things in the troubled corner of northern Mississippi. But beyond […]



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