Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A new UK crime series

Beware the Past (DCI Matt Ballard #1) by Joy Ellis

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Somehow I got myself into another series!  This happens to me a lot.  I feel like it might’ve been a Kindle First though?  I’m not sure.  It could’ve also been a “you’ve read Joy Ellis books before, so you might like this one” too.  Who knows?  I have so many books on my TBR list, so it’s hard to remember where they all came from! Anyway, it’s right up my alley.  It’s a British detective (or whatever they’re called – DCI, DI… I can’t keep […]

I’d Pay So Much to See this as a Movie

The Change by Kirsten Miller

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When picking up the actual book I ordered at the library, I was lured in by their “new releases” display. The book jacket of The Change promised some menopause-induced magic, a murder mystery, and three bada** women taking down some powerful men on the backdrop of a coastal New  York town. So of course I picked it up, and it was an absolutely delightful ride. Harriet, Nessa, and Jo are three women in their 50s going through a rough time. Harriet’s husband leaves her for a […]

Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes

White Bones (Katie Maguire #1) by Graham Masterton

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Have you ever seen these pictures of a professional illustrator who let her four year old finish her drawings? That’s exactly what this book is like: it starts off well, a little weird but well done, and then in the second half of the book it’s amateur hour. On steroids.  On a remote Irish farm, eleven bodies are discovered: their bones are haphazardly strewn about underneath a barn. Weirdly, each thigh bone has a hole in it with a small doll on a wire looped […]

Six Cases, Seven Deaths

The Ghosts That Haunt Me: Memories of a Homicide Detective by Steve Ryan

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Steve Ryan, a veteran of the Toronto homicide squad, tells the tales of six murder investigations among the many that have stuck with him from his time on the force. I enjoy true crime, and morbid as it is, I really enjoy true crime memoirs – there’s something very visceral about it, when the writer can bring their firsthand viewpoint to the table. And Steve Ryan does it well, with a sympathy and care toward the victims and their families that is badly missed in […]

Worth your time, but maybe not the lingering headache

The Treatment by Mo Hayder

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Crime fiction is an odd thing. Visit your average thriller-horror-Facebook group and you’ll regularly find people looking for books that portray the extremes of human behaviour. “The sicker the better”, as they put it. Weirdly, The Treatment by Mo Hayder is not one that pops up very often – possibly because it’s about 20 years old – but in all honesty, this book is intense. We didn’t believe in Trigger Warnings in 2022 but this book could do with a couple of them.  On a […]

Hopefully the last one of these I three-star for a while.

A Better Man (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #15) by Louise Penny

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Not too much to say about this one. Not one of my favorites of this series. Parts of it I really liked, and parts of it I really did not. It’s been over a month now, and I’ve read 1,000 books since then, so I’m really not remembering specifics here. I remember there was a missing woman, and that plotline was interesting. I wished I was more interested in the plotline where Gamache comes back to be the head of the homicide department, a move […]



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