Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The final case for Susan Ryeland?

Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz

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CBR 17 BINGO: Red (see cover) Anthony Horowitz is back with what is most likely the last Susan Ryeland/Atticus Pünd mystery. I’m sad to see the series wind down, but how many times can a person get involved with the same franchise to disastrous results without breaking the audience’s suspension of disbelief? (This isn’t Jurassic Park for heaven’s sake.) If you’re a fan of Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders, you might be wondering how Horowitz could squeeze another novel out of this premise, what with […]

A cozy sff mystery novella that is set in the future but feels like it’s set in the past.

The Mimicking of Known Successes (Mossa and Pleiti, #1) by Malka Older

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 4 Book 27/30 This was really good! I loved the vibes and the writing and the setting. Definitely reading book two. I’m honestly surprised how much I liked this. It’s really hard to find great, vibesy sci-fi these days. A lot of sff authors go for the colder, more depressing, gritty machine-like futures, I think forgetting that humans like to be COMFY. Even though this book is set after humans have colonized Jupiter (of all places); the humans here […]

A burnt out Millennial medium and the ghost of her dead best friend solve crimes. Yes you should read it.

Grave Expectations (Grave Expectations, #1) by Alice Bell

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I knew as soon as I read the blurb for this one early in 2023 that it was going to be a book For Me. Sometimes I do turn out to be wrong about these things, but in this case I was very much right. I had such a good time with this book. (And I’ve had ridiculously good luck with mysteries this year, most of which are having fun with the traditional mystery format/genre). The premise here is that Claire is a thirty-something down-on-her-luck […]

Not the surefire hit I thought it would be.

Stay Awake by Megan Goldin

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Thanks to NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review. I’m as surprised as anyone that I didn’t really like this. It wasn’t a bad read, and there were parts I really liked, but a large part of this book just felt extremely frustrating to me, rather than the intriguing and unsettling the author was going for (I think). Stay Awake kicks off with our MC, Liv, waking up in a taxi with no memory of how she got there, and […]

Fascinating historical fantasy mystery, an okay romance.

Rag and Bone (Rag and Bone, #1) by K.J. Charles

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Sometimes this happens with K.J. Charles and me—and it’s often in this particular magical world of hers, come to think of it—where I am way more interested in the plot and worldbuilding than I am in the central romance. Here, partly it’s because the couple are already together at the start of the book, and the tension of “will they stay together” is just not as inherently interesting to me as “how will they get together and when”. But also, partly, there’s just something about […]

“But a novel always ends, the lies come to the surface, and the deaths are explained. Maybe one of the bad characters gets away with something—that’s fashionable right now—but you are still left with a sense that things are balanced, that dark things come to light, and that the bad person will, at least, most likely be miserable.”

The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James

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This book lit my brain up like a Christmas tree. Nobody knows why certain books hit certain people like they do. That’s part of the magic of art, and of reading. But it worked for me in individual pieces, and it worked as a whole. During parts of it, I could practically hear my synapses yelling far off in the distance a gleeful “wheeeee”. So, here are all the individual components that got me: *The main character, Shea, reads mystery and crime fiction, and reads […]



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