Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Poirot vs. A Serial Killer!

The ABC Murders (Hercule Poirot, #13) by Agatha Christie

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I’ve read a lot of Agatha Christie books at this point (but still have so many left! She was a gift) and this has to be one of my favorite so far. This was also the first of her novels I’ve not read by audiobook, and I liked it! (I do still love the indulgent feeling I get from listening to a Christie by audio, especially if it’s Dan Stevens reading it to me.) I will probably pepper in a few hard copies here and […]

Little Grey Cell Comfort Food

Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly by Agatha Christie

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When I can’t think of anything else to read, or just want something comforting and familiar, there is always Agatha Christie. And although I have read (I think) most of her books by now, I am still drawn most frequently to the ones featuring the inimitable Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot. He of the meticulous ways and fantastic mustaches. With his obsession with detail and as Ben Franklin says, “a place for everything, everything in its place,” he has to be a Virgo, like me. And […]

Reading, Reading, Reading

Broken Places by Tracy Clark

The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie

Solos by Kitty Burns Florey

The Lady Upstairs by Halley Sutton

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Finishing off the year right with another round of great crime fiction… Broken Places 4 stars A really good debut novel that’s pure Chicago without being annoying. A little predictable towards the end but well-written nonetheless. Also, much love for featuring black Roman Catholicism, which is a different expression than the commonly mass produced (re:white) Roman Catholicism of crime novels and movies.   The A.B.C. Murders 4 stars This one was about to highlight why I’m not a big Christie fan, despite usually enjoying her novels. Whereas […]

Poirot Knows

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

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From time-to-time, I like to read a random Agatha Christie. As perhaps the greatest whodunnit writer of all-time, Christie keeps me sharp as a writer, even if I’m not especially a fan of whodunnits. I grabbed this one randomly from my local library, assuming that at any moment, my state will have a stay-at-home order and I’ll have to hunker down again with books. That hasn’t happened…yet. But when I had space over the weekend to get to this one, I was excited to do […]

“You tell your lies and you think nobody knows. But there are two people who know. Yes – two people. One is le bon Dieu – and the other is Hercule Poirot.”

The Mystery of the Blue Train (Hercule Poirot, #6) by Agatha Christie

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This one wasn’t my favorite, though I liked it quite a bit by the end. I had a hard time at first getting a handle on the arc of the story, and Poirot doesn’t come in until about chapter ten, so there are just a bunch of POV characters you’re introduced to before you have any context for why they’re important to the story. I fully realize this is a technique employed by many books I have enjoyed in the past, but there was something […]

An old favorite

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

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I read all of Agatha Christie’s books in the years of elementary through high school. Hercule Poirot heavily influenced my idea of what a Frenchman should be, and I read all of his lines in my head through the filter of my French teacher in 5th grade (Miss Marple sounds like my grandmother, but stuffier, in my head). I haven’t picked up one of her mysteries for at least twenty years but my daughter has recently started to be interested in mysteries so I was […]



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