Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The British Countryside Mystery

A Place of Execution by Val McDermid

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For years, I held out on reading Val McDermid until I could find this book. I can’t remember where it was first recommended to me but it was often billed as the best of her illustrious career. It probably sat on my primary Amazon list for close to two years. Trips to bookstores proved fruitless. Until one day, I stumbled on it for sale at my local library’s book sale. Yay for libraries and their book sales! Even after I got it, it’s probably been […]

Murder, slow and detailed

The Black Tower by P.D. James

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P.D. James is an acquired taste in detective fiction- slow moving and meticulously detail oriented.  Her Adam Dalgliesh novels are a detour from some of the hard-boiled noir detective fiction that is currently fashionable on TV and film.  Adam is not like Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch or Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole; rather, Dalgliesh he is from the ‘gentleman detective working for Scotland Yard’ mold, slowly sifting through clues without breaking the rules. The Black Tower is the 5th Dalgliesh novel and it is set in […]

Light reading for anxious times

Josie by Lynda Page

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This was an unexpectedly lovely and comforting read.  Set in Leicester, England during the late 1960s, the novel is a self-described ‘heartwarming saga’ and that seems about right.  It opens with our main character, the naïve but big-hearted Josie Rawlins, living with her grandmother and working at the family’s market stall.  Through a series of unfortunate events, 19 year old Josie loses her home, her job and her grandmother in one week.  She must fend for herself in a world that she is largely unprepared […]

Libris Mediocris

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

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*Sigh.* Folks. Before we get into this, the customary preamble. These things may seem unrelated at first, but hopefully they’ll make sense shortly enough. There’s a tossed-off line in Stella Gibbons’ excellent Cold Comfort Farm (the movie is also a scream if you haven’t seen it) where one of the characters, an irritating self-satisfied clod of a fellow, is working on a thesis which holds that all of the Brontes’ novels were actually written by their brother Branwell. The little-known film Titanic came out the winter after […]

The Puzzl-iest of Puzzles

The 7.5 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

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The reading experience for this one was something else. In the beginning, I was eagerly tearing the pages, desperate to learn more. From about midway to the 3/4th marker, I got exhausted with the characters and the bottomless plot that was too complex to appreciate. I remembered why I rarely read English countryside mysteries, even books like these that honor them as well as ape them. I just don’t care about puzzle box mysteries that much. But the last 1/4th of this book, when things […]

A middling Daisy Dalrymple story, but the characters make it worth reading

The Corpse at the Crystal Palace by Carola Dunn

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This review is specifically for The Corpse at the Crystal Palace but I’m including my thoughts on the Daisy Dalrymple series as a whole. The series takes place in England in the 1920s. The main character is Mrs. Daisy Fletcher (née the Honorable Daisy Dalrymple). Daisy is the youngest daughter of an English aristocrat and is married to Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher of the New Scotland Yard. Daisy keeps accidentally finding dead bodies and feels compelled to help Alec with his investigations. She is often […]



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