Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“You see, Watson, but you do not observe.”

House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz

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CBR11bingo: Remix I recently had the good fortune to discover Anthony Horowitz, so my expectations were high when I picked up House of Silk, the author’s Sherlock Holmes mystery. I’ll get right to the point: He exceeded my expectations by a wide margin. The estate of Arthur Conan Doyle commissioned Horowitz to write a Sherlock Holmes novel, and their faith proves to be well placed. Horowitz so beautifully captures the voice of John Watson, who characteristically tells the tale, that the novel slides effortlessly into […]

I’ve discovered Anthony Horowitz, and I couldn’t be happier

The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz

The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz

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That’s right, I’ve discovered this wonderful mystery writer. Granted, it’s in much the same way that Columbus discovered the New World, and I imagine my fellow Cannonballers looking at me with bemused expressions and saying, “Blimey, mate, he’s been here for ages if you’d bothered to look.” My fellow Cannonballers are all British in this scenario, and they are also correct. Name recognition, which came from reading several reviews on this site, was responsible for my interest in these novels as much as the intriguing […]

Murder at the Magic School

Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey

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I’ve not had a lot of luck with things highly recommended and hyped by authors whose works I’ve enjoyed.  V.E. Schwab might be an exception. I found out about the impending publication of Magic For Liars from her social media, and picked it up as soon as it came out. The descriptions of the premise as something between Harry Potter and The Magicians is also reasonably accurate; another point for the book, since I frequently don’t quite agree with the blurbs either. The basic idea […]

Consider my Pot, Boiled

A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djèlí Clark

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark

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It started with John Constantine, grouchy creepy detective magician, solving petty punk mysteries and sassing demons.  I love a good pot boiler, but I like them with wizards, or gods, or most preferably ghosts.  My collection is an embarrassment of sassy magicians solving ghost crimes. An anonymous Twitter surfaced in my feed one day to recommend the short story A Dead Djinn in Cairo. Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities must investigate the potential suicide of powerful djinn […]

Finally a break in a streak of not great

strange practice by vivian shaw

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Yeah for finding a new fun series! It’s fairly light, not perfect but quite promising. The basic premise is that Dr. Greta Helsing (daughter of that Helsing; yes, the one you’re probably thinking of) is a doctor for things that go bump in the night, like ghouls, vampires, vampyres, mummies, etc. She’s friends with Edmund Ruthven (yes, that Lord Ruthven), and as a result of a bad thing going on in the monster community, gets together a group including Ruthven, Francis Varney (a vampyr which […]

Who doesn’t like a sci-fi romp?

Head On by John Scalzi

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Recently on twitter, John Scalzi shared a one-star review of one of his books he found. In the review, the writer was upset that Scalzi wrote easily readable sci-fi “romps”. Like me, Scalzi had a hard time finding why writing something that could be described as a romp would be bad. Romps are usually fun, right? Anyway, all of this is to say that Scalzi’s second foray into the world he established in Lock-in is fun, slick and dare I say another romp. Head On, […]



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