Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It’s a real life spy thriller! (And it’s really good!)

The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben Macintyre

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Oh boy, do I love a good espionage thriller. So, continuing with my “what’s free and available” method of choosing books, I picked up my father’s copy of Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War. This is the true story of a high-ranking KGB official who defected to MI6 during the deepest freeze of the Cold War. (KGB is Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti for anyone who plays trivia – it seems like a formidable bonus question). Macintyre interviews […]

The Only Winner Here is Corn.

The Scientist and The Spy by Mara Hvistendahl

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On one hand, I enjoyed reading The Scientist and the Spy, really. Mara Hvistendahl has given us a really compelling account of economic espionage. But Christ, this book is a sticky one. It covers multiple topics I’m interested in: genetics, agriculture, international relations and intellectual property—and political shit-storms. But it also makes me want to bang my head against the wall while crying out ‘everyone’s a pack of arseholes’ because that was basically the only conclusion I could come to. But with a story this […]

A Spy In The Closet

Who Is Vera Kelly? by Rosalie Knecht

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Using spy stories to tell larger tales about identity is becoming a popular trope. Most recently, I’m thinking of how Lauren Wilkinson used the genre to talk about black identity against the specter of white imperialism. Rosalie Knecht does it in a different way with a lesbian woman. There are two stories running concurrently with one another: flashbacks to Vera’s time leading up to joining the CIA and her time in Argentina trying to run counterintelligence on KGB factions attempting to facilitate a communist-led coup. […]

Brexiteers

Agent Running in the Field by John Le Carré

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In a world of constant change and rising menace, it’s good to know that John Le Carré still has it. This won’t go down as one of his great works but it’s still a pretty sharp take on the western world post-Brexit/Trump through the eyes of a disaffected anti-Russia SIS operative who has been mothballed for most of the last two decades while Britain and her American ally swung their swords in the middle east. With Vladimir Putin leading the digital charge to break up […]

”My name, since you raise the topic, is Arthur Aloysius Kimberley de Brabazon Secretan. What would you do in my place?” “Leave the country … You poor bastard, you never stood a chance.” #CBRBingo – The Roaring 20’s

Slippery Creatures (The Will Darling Adventures, #1) by K.J. Charles

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I loved everything about this. K.J. Charles is honestly spoiling me for other historical romance authors. There’s just something about her style (very detailed, historically accurate, flawed but compelling characters) that gets me right in the pleasure center. She also doesn’t just write in one time period or keep it to straight-up romance. She’s always messing around with spy fiction or mystery or golden age pulp (here and Think of England) or jewelry heists or homages to Georgette Heyer regency fiction. Sometimes many of these […]

More Vacation Reading

Black Edge: Insider Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street by Sheelah Kolhatkar

Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia's Attack on the West by Luke Harding

Murder in the Bayou: Who Killed the Women Known as the Jeff Davis 8? by Ethan Brown

The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep by Lawrence Block

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I was on vacation last week (with all the requisite social distancing procedures) and I did a lot of vacation reading. I’m not sure why but lately I’ve been on a non-fiction kick, thus, three out of the four books I read were non-fic. Fortunately for me, everything I read was at least good and all merited the coveted 4-stars. Black Edge I became interested in this story when I learned that Steve Cohen and Preet Bharara’s relationship was the basis for the hit Showtime […]



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