Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“You’ll light your own bloody self on fire if you have to. And then you can pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you knew it all along. Congratulations.”

The Trespassser (Dublin Murder Squad, #6) by Tana French

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Short review for a book that has too much to talk about for me without writing a dissertation. I just find Antoinette Conway to be such an interesting narrator, and I love the way French plays off Conway’s weaknesses with the murder of Aislinn Murray. I had actually forgotten almost everything about this book, except how thorny Conway was as a narrator, and how her paranoia SPOILERS ended up being mostly unjustified END SPOILERS. I had also forgotten how angry Conway made me in her […]

California Loathe

Damage Control by Denise Hamilton

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(TW: mention of rape) There’s a lot going on in this book. Not sure the author pulls it all off but I know that I liked it and I wanted to keep reading to the very end. I had been meaning to read this one for a while. Not only does it wind up on a lot of lists featuring great LA mysteries but the writer herself has cited Ross Macdonald as a major inspiration. This has the setup of an Archer-esque story: someone going […]

Lost and Found

The Searcher by Tana French

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A hallmark of Tana French’s incredible body of work is how she will always use spaces in a critical and often harrowing way to her narrative. Wooded forests, the basement of an abandoned building, a rustic home for young academics…there’s always something mystifying and foreboding about how she can take the banal and make it come alive in ways one wouldn’t expect. Here is no exception. Playing with the familiar English/British countryside mystery, French uses rural Ireland set against the mountains. And as might be […]

What are the readers on Goodreads smoking?

Storm Front by Jim Butcher

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CBR12 BINGO: Fresh Start BINGO: Red, Gateway, Fresh Start, Cannonballer Says, Money Storm Front reads like a novel created buy a guy who played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons as a teen and always dreamed about writing his own fantasy series. And if that’s true, more power to Jim Butcher for fulfilling his dream. I respect the effort and the ambition. Sadly, that doesn’t change the fact that the result is just not good. The premise of this series is appealing enough. Harry Dresden […]

The real message here is to limit your children’s screen time

The Mother-in-Law by Sally Hepworth

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CBR12 Bingo: Pandemic This is another entry in the ever-growing genre of “twisty” books aimed at women. I admit I am always tempted by these books–I have to know what the twist is! And for the most part, I actually enjoyed The Mother-in-Law, unlike some other entries into this genre. The book opens with Lucy and her husband receiving a visit from the police to tell them that Lucy’s mother-in-law, Diana, with whom she has never gotten along, has been found dead by apparent suicide. […]

Y’all Are South’ners Too

The Shameless by Ace Atkins

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To understand the world of Ace Atkins’ Tibbehah County, Mississippi, it would behoove you to be familiar with the work of Spencer Hall, college football writer extraordinaire. Every year, he would write a preview for his website, either edsbs.com or bannersociety.com that mixed football with folklore and social commentary. My personal favorite is 2017’s When The Levee Breaks, where he talked about the life of Huey Long and LSU as a parallel to the rise of Donald Trump. This passage is my particular favorite… There is […]



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