Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The first Christie book I haven’t liked.

The Big Four (Hercule Poirot, #5) by Agatha Christie

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At first listening to this audiobook, I was enjoying myself quite a bit. Poirot was there, Hastings was there, back from Brazil, and aren’t we all having a good time now that this mysterious man has shown up in the bedroom, and then expired. Except pretty quickly after that, I realized in fact that the book was not good, and I was not enjoying myself, and even though I did listen to the whole thing in its entirety, I did not *listen* to the book […]

“I’m sorry. I was wrong. I need help. I don’t know.”

Bury Your Dead (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #6) by Louise Penny

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I’m officially hooked on this series. With the exception of books two and three, which I thought were dips in quality, this series just keeps getting better. Part of my enjoyment comes from this being essentially now a serialized story. The first four you could pick up out of order and still get everything out of them that Penny wanted you to. But this one almost entirely depends, narratively and emotionally, on the previous five books, but mostly the fifth. Spoilers for previous books to […]

I have now conquered the complete Sherlock Holmes.

The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes, #9) by Arthur Conan Doyle

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I’m glad he went for one more round. I liked all of these better than the ones in His Last Bow. Because I’m fast running out of review posting time, I’m copying and pasting all my mini-reviews for this book. I will hopefully put up a real review on Goodreads HERE within the next couple of days, and also a full review of The Complete Sherlock Holmes HERE. I’m not posting it on CBR because I’ve already counted all nine books to my tally this […]

Detective Novel from Morocco, kind of a mixed bag

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Whitefly is a short detective novel by Moroccan writer Abdelilah Hamdouchi. Hamdouchi writes crime fiction and has had success as a screen writer of police thrillers. This novel was first published in Arabic in 2000 and translated by Jonathan Smolin in 2016. It is a noir-ish story of bodies washed up on the shore in Tangier. Are the deaths related? And why does one of the bodies have gunshot wounds? Detective Khalid Ibrahim, aka Laafrit, must rely on his instincts and connections both in the […]

“You are the one fixed point in a changing age.”

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This is the shortest Holmes story collection: only eight stories and a preface written by Watson, explaining that Holmes is now retired to Sussex and keeping bees, and here are some stories he hasn’t yet published about their adventures, including their very last one. (All the stories in the last published book, The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes, apparently take place before “His Last Bow” as well.) Because of the shortness, you feel it a little bit more when a story is a dud. In particular, […]

Somehow this series still works.

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This one started out really strong for me, and then petered out near the end, for a couple of reasons, which I will be marking in spoiler tags. Mary and Holmes continue to be a great pair, and I find their cerebral marriage a compelling one, though I am beginning to get a bit annoyed with King for discounting Watson so much. Here, we meet an old friend from the first book, the archaeologist Dorothy Ruskin, who shows up in Sussex for a visit, and […]



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