Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

When the skeptic becomes borderline unlikable

I’ll Be Waiting by Kelley Armstrong

by Leave a Comment

Bingo Square: Border (with seances and Ouija boards, it’s the boundaries/borders between life and the afterlife/supernatural) This one was a bit of a miss for me for Kelley Armstrong – I really loved her Women of the Otherworld series, and in general, her other novels, whether supernatural or romance, tend to work for me. This specific novel is one of the supernatural/paranormal ones – the main character and narrator is Nic, a new widow after her husband Anton died in a car crash less than […]

The Jock and the Nerd, 20 years later

Writing Mr. Wrong by Kelley Armstrong

by Leave a Comment

Bingo Square – Arts (one character is a writer – this could have also fit into Play with the hockey but I have something else in mind for that square) I was surprised when I saw that Kelley Armstrong was writing contemporary romances since I had first discovered her through her urban fantasy series, Women of the Otherworld– then again, I read broadly across genres so it makes sense that an author would have a variety of interests. This is the second of her contemporary […]

“A Victorian widow, a Canadian detective, and a preteen pickpocket walk into a bar …”

Cocktails & Chloroform (A Rip Through Time 2.5) by Kelley Armstrong

by Leave a Comment

This novella takes place between The Poisoner’s Ring and Disturbing The Dead and provides some adventure, as well as some backstory on one of the secondary characters of the series, Mallory’s fellow maid, Alice.  Alice is the preteen pickpocket of the quote used in the title of this review, although she’s given up the pickpocket life, as she’s been taken under the wing of Isla. In the before times of this series, when Mallory was living in 2019 and Catriona was living in 1869 and […]

“There are many skills I hoped to master in my professional career. Scrubbing chamber pots was not one of them, and yet here we are.”

The Posioners Ring by Kelley Armstrong

by Leave a Comment

This is the second book in the A Rip Through Time series, so the review ahead contains some minor spoilers for book one.   Having established how Mallory ended up in Victorian Scotland in the first book, and starting a crime-solving career in that era, this book is about her settling into her new life and dealing with yet more murder.  The story is a self-contained mystery that manages to resolve itself while filling in some characters’ backstories and introducing some new characters. Also, the slow-burn […]

“You try fighting crime as a nineteen-year-old Victorian housemaid.”

A Rip Through Time (A Rip Through Time #1) by Kelley Armstrong

by 4 Comments

To be clear this (the first in a series) is a time travel, historical fiction with a light dusting of maybe implied possible romance.  It should not be confused with the author’s A Stitch In Time series which are time travel, historical fiction, and romance novels.   Am I putting that disclaimer here because I was confused about the similarity in the series name?  Yes.  Yes, I am. In this series, we start in Edinburgh on May 20, 2019.  Vancouver police detective Mallory Atkinson is […]

Isolated Island Horror

Hemlock Island by Kelley Armstrong

by Leave a Comment

A standalone horror novel from Kelley Armstrong, Hemlock Island is the story of Laney Kilpatrick who is renting out her (amazingly described) second home.  She’s doing this begrudgingly, she got the house in her divorce but the cost of maintaining her isolated island home, plus maintaining the apartment she shares with her niece, well it’s share your space with strangers, or not have the house on Hemlock Island at all.  However, some of the people renting out the island home have left some … remnants […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo