Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“It came to something when you found yourself hoping that the footsteps you heard were ghosts.”

All of Us Murderers by KJ Charles

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I am ever so pleased with my first Aardvark book! Only my third 5-star rating of the year (although a couple have been close).  I chose this one on vibes – I was partway through Band Sinister and enjoying myself, loved the cover, and was in the mood to say yes to some gothic mystery goodness. All of Us Murderers is KJ Charles playing with all the gothic novel tropes and putting her own spin on making the queer textual in a genre where it was subtext for most of its history.  The book starts with […]

“Jesus, who would want to read about a failed old nun, with her stipend, and second-hand shoes.”

Murder at Gulls Nest by Jess Kidd

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What a kooky mystery book. My mom was visiting for the last few days and she and I love to get our blankets and read (which we indulged in doing) so she was perfectly placed to ask me what was going on within the fun orange cover of this book. The quick logline doesn’t really capture the vibe of the book, though, and I don’t know whether I sold her on it or not. Murder at Gulls Nest features Nora, a former Carmelite nun who has left her order after three decades and is on the hunt for a […]

And now there’s a ghost cat, as if a dead body wasn’t enough.

Something Whiskered (A Cat in the Stacks Mystery #17) by Miranda James

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Charlie Harris is a mid-fifties librarian in a small college in Athens, Mississippi, who shares his house with a cast of characters, and two cats; Ramses, an orange tabby, and Diesel, a 35 lb. Maine Coon the size of apparently a Beagle (why this cat is not in the Guinness Book of Records, I don’t know). Charlie, being a proper Southern Gentleman, and a nosy coot who believes he can do a better job than the police, decides he needs to get involved in every […]

Murder and murder and murder and murder and murder on the Orient Express.

Five Found Dead by Sulari Gentill

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Thanks to NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. This was a really solid murder mystery, but I do want to warn everyone that it is nowhere near as twisty and meta as you might be expecting if you’ve read some of her previous books. Don’t do like I did and keep waiting for some mega surprising twist at the end; it’s not that kind of book. When they say they’ve solved the mystery, they’ve solved […]

This game is not as fun as the original

The Game is Murder by Hazell Ward

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Bingo 5: G square (first noun of the title is “Game”) Clue the concept and experience is best executed first by the movie (all hail Tim Curry), second by the board game, and very distant thirdly by the novel The Game is Murder. The story takes a family tragedy in 1920s England (the age of the Great Detective) that the family feels is not satisfactorily solved. Lord John Verreman is accused of murdering the nanny having mistaken her for his wife (they had a rocky […]

To DNF or not DFN

The Antique Hunter's Death on the Red Sea by C. L. Miller

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Scenario: You start reading a book, and then get a reminder that it’s due back to the library soon. Assuming no renewals, do you 1) speed through the rest, or 2) give up. The Antique Hunter’s Death on the Red Sea is going to be a ‘give it back not completely read’ for me. There’s nothing wrong with it as far as I’ve gotten, but it’s not quite what I want right now. I kind of wonder if I’d read the first in the series […]



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