Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Frothy Adventure With Hints at Depth

The Selkie Scandal by Rosalie Oaks

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The Earl of Beresford isn’t expecting to get accosted by a naked woman on the beach, but the selkie cares little for propriety and demands help in finding her kidnapped brother, the High Prince of Skerry.  Beresford reluctantly agrees and sets out with his crew, a selkie princess, and a case of Beresford Plum Jam in order to find the missing prince. This is a delightful little novella, though it does raise more questions than answers.  It’s the prequel to a mystery series that I’m […]

Kin in Far-flung Places

A Disappearance in Fiji by Nilima Rao

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CBR17 Bingo: Diaspora – This story is intimately bound up in the experience of the Indian diaspora in colonial Fiji, who went to work there as indentured servants but were in reality little more than slaves. Caught between demotion and disgrace, Indian police officer Akal Singh is instead posted to colonial Fiji, where an investigation into the vanishing of an indentured Indian woman from a sugarcane plantation is complicated by the political pressures within the British Empire. I’m a sucker for an unusual setting in […]

“Stop dreaming about the spires. It was a dreadful place and those were dreadful people, and you and I got caught in their games and paid for it.”

Death in the Spires by K.J. Charles

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If you read The Secret History and hated the characters, and the bleak ending made you feel terrible, this might be the book for you! In her first non-romance, we’ve got K.J. Charles trying her hand (and succeeding) at a historical mystery, dark academia style. It’s 1905, and our main character is Jeremy “Jem” Kite, who has just been fired from his job when a letter accusing him of murder showed up in his employers’ mail. This is not the first or even the tenth such letter […]

Mystery at Sea

Ghost Ship: The Mysterious True Story of the Mary Celeste and Her Missing Crew by Brian Hicks

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The legend of the Mary Celeste, ghost ship of the Atlantic, has sort of always been in my periphery, coming from an ocean-going family. It is at its core a terrible mystery that escaped containment and became a legend that was pulled apart and put back together again from its inception and lasted over a hundred years to the point that its story became almost unrecognizable, even shifting the ship’s name in the retellings.   The Mary Celeste had the sort of history that would lead some […]

A Purrfect Beginning Chapter Book

Casebook of a Private (Cat's) Eye by Mary Stolz

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Eileen O’Kelly is a female gumshoe in Boston at the turn of the century.  She’s also a cat as are most the of the characters in the book.  As the only female private eye in Boston and having just opened her agency that year, work is a little thin on the ground.  But mysteries both large and small find her, and Eileen does her best to solve them, sometimes finding more than a few surprises along the way. This beginning chapter book is perfect for […]

“We shall be useful. But just as importantly we shall be defiant, occasionally ill-mannered, and completely indomitable.”

The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies by Alison Goodman

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The historical detail of this book was incredibly pleasing (the afterword notes that she submitted 2/3 of it as her dissertation for her PhD!) and I am definitely in for reading more from this series. My favorite thing from this author that I’ve read by quite a large margin. I was pretty sure going in that this was a romance, because of the cover and the ladies in dresses, but like the cover (which hides its weapons amidst the folds of a dress) this book […]



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