Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

December 2023 Leftovers

Mandarin Plaid by SJ Rozan

Lady Killer, Volume 1 by Joëlle Jones

Zatanna: The Jewel of Gravesend by Alys Arden

Batman, Vol. 6: Graveyard Shift by Scott Snyder

The Confession by Domenic Stansberry

A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself by William Boyle

Joe Dogs: The Life and Crimes of a Mobster by Joseph Iannuzzi

Robert B. Parker's Cheap Shot by Ace Atkins

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

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Merry Christmas. We may need to dispense with the cold/snow songs. They’re about as realistic as Santa at this point. Mandarin Plaid **** SJ Rozan continues to improve with each book in this series. This one has layers and moves well to its conclusion. I’m not gonna be totally sold on a white person writing from the perspective of an AAPI one but I think Rozan does a better job with it than she did in the first one. May have to go long with […]

The Hands of Providence

City on Fire by Don Winslow

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I kinda knew what to expect with this Don Winslow novel going in and yet, I still wound up having a good time. Winslow is famous for taking historical crime events and melding them into fictional tales. He did it with the history of the West Coast mob in The Winter of Frankie Machine, one of my favorite crime reads of the last few years. Here he draws inspiration from the Boston-Providence mob and their wars of the 90s post-Patriarca. Oh and he decided to tell […]

Casino

The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America's Forgotten Capital of Vice by David Hill

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Part of my family is from Arkansas. I never knew Hot Springs to be such a den of vice! This is about as entertaining as true crime can get, especially if you like mob tales as I do. There are three running threads in the story: Dane, Owney, and Hazel. Dane becomes the top man for gambling in the city almost by accident but does all he can to legalize it. His ideas are actually ingenious but he’s consistently working against Arkansas’ theocratic bureaucracy. Owney, […]

BadFellas

Murder Machine by Gene Mustain & Jerry Capeci

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Kind of wonder what could have been if Martin Scorsese had gotten his hands on this book before Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy. This is Goodfellas, only if the murder montage was like half the movie. I knew the name Roy DeMeo and that he was the head of perhaps the most murderous crew in Mafia history but I didn’t know exactly what is story was or how it operated. On a bit of a mob kick, I finally picked this one up. It’s a brutal tale and both writers […]

Babylon Brooklyn

A Brotherhood Betrayed: The Man Behind the Rise and Fall of Murder, Inc. by Michael Cannell

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Look, I am very simple. I like mob books, especially but not limited to ones set in New York City. If you write a good mob tale, fiction or non-fiction, I’ll devour it and give you your credit. So that’s what I’m here to do with this one. I’ve been curious about the Abe Reles story ever since reading Kevin Baker’s flat, unoriginal The Big Crowd. His ghost seemed to loom over everything mob and politic related in New York for decades. The head of the mob’s […]

Leonard: the man

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After Djibouti I needed some classic Leonard to get me back on track as a fan. The aforementioned novel was one of his last, and is quite the slog, so I was eager to give him another go as I am enamored with his characters as I have seen them in the hit show “Justified.” Get Shorty, later made into the film starring Travolta, is a hoot and a half. I am always a fan of mobsters (I adore Casino, Goodfellas, etc) and a touch […]



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