Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A murder mystery within a murder mystery, and a lovely homage to the genre.

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

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I really, really enjoyed this one. I’ve struggled the past several weeks to really get into the books I’m reading, even if I’m liking them. But I just fell into this book. Horowitz has a lot of fun playing around with his premise and the conventions of a whodunit, and it’s fun to read as a result. The book opens with a frame story. Alan Conway, the famous author of the Atticus Pünd detective books, has turned in his last Pünd book, and his editor […]

Middle of the (surface) road

Two Kinds of Truth by Michael Connelly

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Another installment in Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, this recent (2017) book follows Bosch through two plot lines: 1) the re-opening of an old murder file where a convicted killer alleges Bosch framed him; and 2) a recent double murder tied to the opioid epidemic. This was the fourth Harry Bosch novel I’ve read, and for the first 75 pages I swore I’d read it before (I actually flipped forward a little to see if I recognized the plot points).  I think part of déjà […]

Crime, Boy I Don’t Know

The Galton Case by Ross Macdonald

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CBR11Bingo: I Love This (Not this book specifically, but post-war California noir in general.) For a while I thought The Galton Case might be the realization of my Ideal Novel. I suppose it terribly “male” of me, but there’s nothing I like reading about more than a tough-guy private detective dealing with a rich family full of dark secrets, driving around California and occasionally getting knocked out by street-wise gangsters. Raymond Chandler is the most well-known practitioner of the form, but for my money Ross […]

“Arrange your ideas. Be methodical. Be orderly. There is the secret of success.” – Not Hastings

The Murder on the Links (Hercule Poirot, #2) by Agatha Christie

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Okay, first of all, Hastings is an *idiot*. I don’t think I quite realized that in the other books I’ve read with him in them. He’s supposedly modeled after Watson from the Sherlock Holmes stories, an audience surrogate character, but Watson gets an unfair rap about his bumbling—a side effect of his characterization on film rather than evidence in the canon—whereas Hastings is genuinely a boob, and one that doesn’t realize the extent of his boobitude. In this one, not only does he get everything […]

“He knew time could heal. But it could also do more damage. A forest fire, spread over time, would consume everything.”

A Trick of the Light (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #7) by Louise Penny

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Clara Morrow has finally been discovered as an artist at the age of fifty. She has her own solo show in a prestigious Montreal art museum, and to celebrate, her friends are throwing her a party in their small village of Three Pines. Everything is going smashingly, until a dead body is discovered in her garden, and it turns out to be her old childhood friend, Lillian, with whom she had a bitter parting as an adult. With yet another dead body in close proximity […]

My first cozy mystery.

A Quiet Life in the Country (Lady Hardcastle Mysteries, #1) by T E Kinsey

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Yet another book where I really just want a 3.5 star rating. I liked it more than three stars, but I didn’t like it enough for four. This was a fun, cozy little mystery set in England in 1908. It follows Florence “Flo” Armstrong, our narrator, who is a servant of the Lady Emily Hardcastle, but she and her employer have a singular relationship. They are more like friends than employer and employee, due to events that happened in their mysterious past, a past which […]



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