Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

…but the past ain’t through with you.

Broken Harbor (Dublin Murder Squad #4) by Tana French

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Broken Harbor, by Tana French, is not a book. It is a jagged ball of glass that dazzles the eyes but draws blood as deftly as a razor blade. Detectives Mike “Scorcher” Kennedy, lead investigator of the Dublin Murder Squad, and his rookie partner Richie Curran are assigned a high profile murder case. A family of four, including two young children, have been brutally attacked in their home in the housing estate of Brianstown. Swift justice is called for and Kennedy’s close rate is the […]

Enticing, female driven mystery-thriller

The Banker's Wife by Cristina Alger

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The Banker’s Wife is a mystery thriller following two women, Annabel and Marina, and their pursuit to uncover the links between a deadly plane crash and a larger international conspiracy. If that description is vague, it’s meant to be. I had a lot of fun reading this book, and I despair robbing anyone else of that pleasure. Easy to read and compelling, Cristina Alger excels at deepening the female protagonists’ inner lives and motivations without resorting to cheap stereotypes or dependence on the men in […]

World Needs Bad Men

Corruption City by Horace McCoy

Blood on the Moon by James Ellroy

L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy

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I don’t necessarily agree with the title, which comes from the famous exchange from season one of the TV show True Detective. But since it’s thematic of the three books I read recently, I decided to go with it. I hate coming up with titles. Corruption City ***** A fun crime tale that should have been better. McCoy lays out a good story but halfway through, it’s like an editor reminded him it’s a pulp novel so he has to take shortcuts. Still an entertaining tale. McCoy might […]

Back in Ilona Andrews’ Atlanta, this time with a new protagonist

Blood Heir by Ilona Andrews

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Info to new readers – while this is the first book in a new series, and as such, should be perfectly accessible to readers completely unaware of Ilona Andrews’ previous books, it references A LOT of stuff that happened in the ten-book Kate Daniels series, as well as in Iron and Magic, a spin-off book of that series. I would highly recommend that you start there. Aurelia Ryder arrives back in Atlanta after an eight-year absence, trying to keep her presence mostly under the radar. The last time […]

Boy Bites Man

Man Tiger (Lelaki Harimau) by Eka Kurniawan

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Man Tiger starts out with a killer opening line: On the evening Margio killed Anwar Sadat, Kyai Jahro was blissfully busy with his fishpond. This crime leaves the populace of a small Indonesian fishing village in shock—Margio, barely twenty, is a well known and well-liked kid. Margio has never been prone to violence. Some folks speculate that with the recent deaths of both his little sister and his father, the boy possibly just snapped. But why was Anwar Sadat the target of his violence? And […]

I laughed, I cried, I will re-read.

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

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“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.” This is my favorite of Backman’s books (that I’ve read) by quite a large margin. I would […]



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