Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Officer Involved

You Can Die Trying by Gar Anthony Haywood

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I’ve been going through some of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series this past year. One thing I’ve written about it is my concern of how Connelly walks to the edge of police criticism but then draws back because he needs his Harry Bosch character to be “good,” even when Harry is bending and breaking laws to solve cases that apparently only he can solve. I like Connelly a lot, I really do. But reading Gar Anthony Haywood’s take on systemic racism and police brutality in You […]

Happy Thanksgiving!

Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan, et al.

Mrs. March by Virginia Fieto

Quarry's Vote by Max Allan Collins

The Man Who Came Uptown by George Pelecanos

Hit List by Lawrence Block

The Overlook by Michael Connelly

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Happy Thanksgiving! In addition to feasting on food, I spend the holiday feasting on books. After a few long reads, I plowed through some things I’ve been meaning to get to for a while. Enjoy! Y: The Last Man **** I was excited to finally read this, being a big Brian K. Vaughan fan and being intrigued by the premise. Stephen King blurbed this as the best comic he ever read. The TV show looked good and I wanted to get in on it. And […]

YA POV of the LA riots

The Black Kids by Christina Hammonds Reed

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And with this review of Christina Hammonds Reed’s The Black Kids, I made a bingo just under the wire. I received this for free from my Mocha Girls Read book club as it was our July sponsored book of the month. This YA historical novel is set against the backdrop of the 1992 LA riots. From the get, I was like is it really historical?! But I have to admit it has been some time since that fateful Rodney King verdict. Ashley Bennett lives in […]

Shelfie: These Toxic Things

These Toxic Things by Rachel Howzell Hall

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I LOVED THIS BOOK!!!!!!!!  I’m using this book as my “Shelfie” – so here’s the picture of the ebook in my Kindle account. (Not nearly as exciting as a physical copy…)  For anyone who has read any of my reviews, it’s probably apparent that I love mystery novels. However, I haven’t read many where the main character is a young black woman who is determined to solve a mystery. Generally, in fact, it’s white women. Middle to upper middle class white women. Which is a […]

Been There, Doing That Again

Rose Gold by Walter Mosley

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Read as part of CBR13Bingo: Old Series. The Easy Rawlins series debuted in 1990. As the times change, Walter Mosley has changed his most famous creation with them. He’s also changed his style. I don’t know if it’s for better or worse but I like it. I’ve written on his Leonid McGill series about how Mosley has incorporated some surrealist existentialism into those works and how they felt different to what he had written before. These don’t read like McGill books but they do have […]

When You’re Too Hard Core for Raymond Chandler

Fast One by Paul Cain

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Bingo square – People This noir classic was created when Paul Cain patched together five stories that he had written for the detective magazine Black Mask.  Published in 1933, it soon became famous as the book that was just too hardboiled to be fashioned into a movie.  And seriously, it is, even by today’s standards.  Daaaaamn son. Paul Cain was by then a slippery character in Hollywood.  That was not his real name, nobody was quite sure where he was from (spoiler, Iowa, actually), and […]



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