Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

State of Terror

State of Terror by Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny

by Leave a Comment

Don’t be mad at me. But this book was not good.  It did not help that then we have Armand Gamache and the village of Three Pines come into play which makes me shudder about where Penny plans on taking that series. The characters were not developed very well (and this is in a 500 page book). The writing was repetitive and I honestly don’t want to read the words Madame Secretary for like a fortnight. The flow was awful. The setting of the White […]

A placeholder of an Inspector Gamache novel

A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny

by Leave a Comment

In a way, it doesn’t help to be reading a series well after some of its books are published when it’s as highly sequential as the Inspector Gamache books are. I’ve also been regularly dipping in and out of novels in Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn series, and the serialization is much, much lighter, which means you can read them out of order. No such luck with Louise Penny, which was a downside here because I was pretty sure that Gamache’s new job, as the commander […]

January 2022 Leftovers

Hit Parade by Lawrence Block

Sex Criminals, Volume 1: One Weird Trick by Matt Fraction, Chip Zdarsky

Devils In Exile by Chuck Hogan

Ex Machina, The Deluxe Edition: Vol. 2 by Brian K. Vaughan

A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny

Munich by Robert Harris

Shella by Andrew Vachss

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler

The Accomplice by Lisa Lutz

No One Will Miss Her by Kat Rosenfeld

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris

by Leave a Comment

My resolution for Cannonball Read in 2022 is to only write reviews where I feel like I have much to say and then dump the others in a singular post at the end of the month to track how much I’ve read. This’ll spare me from writing 250+ words about books that I can’t even think of a hundred for. So… Hit Parade **** I enjoy these books and while this is the one I maybe enjoyed the least (did EVERY story need cutaway conversations with […]

This series is not for me

Still Life by Louise Penny

by 1 Comment

Hoo boy…after the high of the previous book I reviewed, this one took a hard turn into disappointment.  It should have been everything I like in a book – a no-nonsense detective, mysterious death, some quirky characters who may or may not be the perpetrator of the crime.  It’s even set in small town Quebec – I’m Canadian, this should be great!  Even most of the reviews were glowing, and as the first book in a series I hoped to be able to settle into […]

Murder goes on vacation

The Murder Stone by Louise Penny

by Leave a Comment

Armand Gamache, the dapper detective from la belle province’s Surety de Quebec, is back in this fourth installment in Louise Penny’s series. This time Gamache is not in Three Pines, the idyllic but murder-y town in Quebec’s eastern townships, but Manoir Bellechasse, a lakeside hotel resort the next valley over. It is the height of summer and Armand and his wife, Reine-Marie, are celebrating their anniversary the same way they do every year, at the Manoir. The resort’s other guests are the Finneys, a snooty […]

The weakest one of these in a while.

Kingdom of the Blind (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #14) by Louise Penny

by 4 Comments

Lots of mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand, I really liked the main conceit of the plot, that this old woman makes Gamache, Myrna, and a strange young man named Benedict the liquidators of her will, despite that none of them knew her. The woman, who called herself the Baroness, had a strange and interesting past, and as often happens in these books, a murder occurs. The B-plot of the book follows Cadet Amelia Choquet after she is expelled from the academy […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo