Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone can do anything.”

The Searcher by Tana French

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This was slower paced and less twisty-turny than her other books but I loved that about it. I liked her last book, The Witch Elm, but I loved this one. This is also a character study as well as a mystery/crime novel (that isn’t part of her Dublin Murder series), but here the protagonist is a former cop from Chicago who retired and decided to try and find peace in the Irish countryside. He bought a beaten down farmhouse and has spent a lot of […]

Poirot Knows

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

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From time-to-time, I like to read a random Agatha Christie. As perhaps the greatest whodunnit writer of all-time, Christie keeps me sharp as a writer, even if I’m not especially a fan of whodunnits. I grabbed this one randomly from my local library, assuming that at any moment, my state will have a stay-at-home order and I’ll have to hunker down again with books. That hasn’t happened…yet. But when I had space over the weekend to get to this one, I was excited to do […]

Second verse same as the first?

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley

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A group of old friends from college go on vacation together every New Year’s Eve. They tell themselves that after the initial awkwardness of reuniting wears off, they realize how much they still have in common and mean to one another. But not New Year’s Eve 2018. The differences have become more pronounced, and their physical and emotional distance reminds them of long-held grievances and hurt feelings. When one of them is found dead, everyone’s a suspect (okay, maybe not the infant). After loving Lucy […]

Lady Charlotte Holmes investigates closer to home

Murder on Cold Street by Sherry Thomas

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Spoiler warning! This is the fifth book in an ongoing series, and as such, this review may and probably will contain spoilers for earlier books. If you’re not caught up, go start at the beginning, with A Study in Scarlet Women.    Official book description: Inspector Treadles, Charlotte Holmes’s friend and collaborator, has been found locked in a room with two dead men, both of whom worked with his wife at the great manufacturing enterprise she has recently inherited.   Rumours fly. Had Inspector Treadles killed […]

She Used to Meet Me on the (Lower) East Side

The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe

Lush Life by Richard Price

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Read two consecutive books whose geographies bumped up against each other; one set in Manhattan’s Chinatown, the other set partially in it, as well as the adjacent East Village. Both were excellent in their own respective ways. The Snakehead How is Patrick Radden Keefe so damn good at writing non-fiction? This doesn’t reach the heights of Say Nothing (really what can?) but it’s a fascinating story in its own right and Keefe tells it well and thoroughly, providing enough detail without larding the narrative. He also takes […]

Another solid work from Charlie N Holmberg

Spellbreaker by Charlie N. Holmberg

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In Victorian England, magic leaves traces: runes, smells, and even sounds, and Elsie Camden has the rare ability to not only perceive these vestiges of magic but to undo the magic behind them, though she cannot perform any magic herself. Elsie is employed by two people: a stonemason who can perform only the most basic spells and a mysterious cadre of people trying to equalize the world. It is with this group, The Cowls, that Elsie uses her unregistered and illegal skills to undo unjust […]



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