Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Quizzical Case of Murder

The Killer Question by Janice Hallett

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A few years back, there was a Jeopardy champion who proved to be a controversial figure in the quizzing community. His main offense? He and his friends weren’t very amiable bar trivia participants. They didn’t order many drinks or any food, they didn’t interact with the other teams, they were rude to staff, disputed any ruling they deemed questionable, and, of course, they won every single week. Bar trivia, or pub quiz as our friends across the pond would prefer it, can be either a […]

Wherever You Go, There You Are

The Killer Question by Janice Hallett

Kiss Her Goodbye by Lisa Gardner

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CBR17 Bingo: Migrant – Both books involve characters who move to places they expect no one knows them and try, with varying success, to rebuild themselves into new shapes. The Killer Question by Janice Hallett – 5 stars Sue and Mal run a perfectly average British pub with an above average weekly quiz night, but the arrival of a mysterious new team that dominates the competition and the discovery of a body in the nearby river sends their lives into a tailspin. This is my […]

The Devil is in the Detail between these Two Mysteries

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett

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I am in the midst of binging some mystery books, and recently read Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone and The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels. I was unfamiliar with these authors and coincidentally read them one after the other. I was pleasantly surprised how complementary they were with each other. Everyone tells the story of a dysfunctional family reunion that quickly turns into multiple murders told from the point of view of one of the family members who happens to be a mystery writer […]

Don’t Become the Story

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett

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CBR 15 Bingo: On the Air – This book is about a pair of authors in pursuit of the truth about a twenty year-old murder-suicide case – but what information will be revealed to the public is still up for debate. Amanda is a well-known true crime author who has been invited to write a book about the mysterious case of the Alperton Angels, a small cult which twenty years ago committed mass suicide after attempting to sacrifice an infant they believed to be the […]

This book was a ride.

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett

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What it comes down to with this book is that I just had a great time while reading it. I really feel like Janice Hallett is getting better with every book. She had the puzzle element down in the first book but I didn’t care about the characters or connect emotionally with the story. In her second book, The Twyford Code, I connected hard with the characters thanks to some clever twistiness and she still had the nice puzzle element, even leveled up a little. With […]

“I disagree. If a feeling knocks and no one answers, it’ll get p[EXPLICIT]d off. It’ll kick the door in, chuck the gift at you and smash your best ornaments so you don’t disrespect it again. You’ll be clearing up a lot more mess than you had to start with. So it’s good, Maxine, to cry if you want. Remember that.”

The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett

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I might have to go lower my rating for The Appeal based on how much more I liked this one. The premise is once again based on a unique format; this time instead of being told through emails, we’ve got audio recordings made on an old iPhone 4 by a man just out of an eleven year prison stint. The difference between her first book and this one, aside from being more elaborate, is that here we have characters to emotionally connect to. In The Appeal, the format […]



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