Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“You’ll light your own bloody self on fire if you have to. And then you can pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you knew it all along. Congratulations.”

The Trespassser (Dublin Murder Squad, #6) by Tana French

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Short review for a book that has too much to talk about for me without writing a dissertation. I just find Antoinette Conway to be such an interesting narrator, and I love the way French plays off Conway’s weaknesses with the murder of Aislinn Murray. I had actually forgotten almost everything about this book, except how thorny Conway was as a narrator, and how her paranoia SPOILERS ended up being mostly unjustified END SPOILERS. I had also forgotten how angry Conway made me in her […]

Just what I needed to cure the pandemic blues

The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith

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CBR12 BINGO: Book Club Under normal circumstances, I’d be spending a good chunk of my Saturdays volunteering at the zoo. Obviously, that isn’t happening right now, because pandemic. One consequence of that is I haven’t been able to see much of the other volunteers that I frequently spend my Saturdays with, except for a couple of Zoom meetings. I made a casual suggestion that we could form a book club; one person got excited and ran with it, and we ended up with a small […]

Murder she solved

The Skull Beneath the Skin by P.D. James

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The Skull Beneath the Skin is the 3rd and final novel in the brick of a P.D. James compilation I’ve been reading.  Luckily things went out on a high note as this last novel was my favourite of the three.  Unlike the previous two novels (The Black Tower and Death of an Expert Witness), The Skull Beneath the Skin is a Cordelia Gray mystery (the others featured her Scotland Yard detective, Adam Dalgliesh). The mystery in Skull Beneath the Skin kicks off after Cordelia, who […]

A detective story you can actually (maybe) solve before the end.

The Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Soji Shimada

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This is another book I got from the recommendation section of I Don’t Even Own a Television. It is an admitted failing of mine that I haven’t read a whole lot of non-western fiction. We own more than a few untouched Haruki Murakami books. I’ve seen a fair amount of Korean and Chinese film, but that’s not at all the same thing. So probably the biggest hurdle I had to get over in reading this was getting past the frequent digressions into memories and emotions […]

Back to Form

The Crossing` by Michael Connelly

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The Crossing is the 18th Harry Bosch novel, and in this installment we catch him 6 months into his forced retirement from the LAPD.  When Harry gets a call from his half-brother, Mickey Haller (the Lincoln Lawyer) asking Harry to take a look into one of his cases, Harry is torn between residual loyalty to the police force and ensuring justice is done.  Harry quickly becomes convinced that Haller’s client is innocent, and joins the dark side (legal defence) in a race to find the […]

Another good outing for Atkinson

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

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This second installment in Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie detective series begins with Jackson witnessing a road rage incident at the Edinburgh festival, and from there Atkinson spins out into chapters focusing individually on Jackson and other supporting characters: Martin, a mild-mannered mystery writer; Gloria, the wife of an aging mobster; and Louise, a policewoman who keeps crossing paths with Jackson.  As with Atkinson’s other Jackson Brodie novels, the threads for all these characters eventually wind together in a satisfying way. Although I found this 2nd novel […]



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