Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Steampunk, historical fiction, mystery?

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley

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I love steampunk and this cover is as steampunk at they get (plus the hardcover one actually has a cutout on the cover that reveals the watch on the inside page which is a really cool design).  The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley is a delightful read that defies genres.  The book takes place in Victorian London when the Irish Nationalist movement is terrorizing the city.   Bombings at Scotland yard and Victoria station are being investigated.  Could anybody but a master clockworker have […]

A middling Daisy Dalrymple story, but the characters make it worth reading

The Corpse at the Crystal Palace by Carola Dunn

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This review is specifically for The Corpse at the Crystal Palace but I’m including my thoughts on the Daisy Dalrymple series as a whole. The series takes place in England in the 1920s. The main character is Mrs. Daisy Fletcher (née the Honorable Daisy Dalrymple). Daisy is the youngest daughter of an English aristocrat and is married to Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher of the New Scotland Yard. Daisy keeps accidentally finding dead bodies and feels compelled to help Alec with his investigations. She is often […]

Angel In Disguise

The Black Angel by Cornell Woolrich

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Welp…you can check Cornell Woolrich’s name off the list of great Golden Age noir writers I have yet to read. It took me way too long. What I found most interesting about The Black Angel was Woolrich’s style. I don’t know what I expected, perhaps something more hardboiled or with a benighted prose. But he doesn’t write like that, at least for this one. Woolrich is a smooth writer, not prone to overwriting or making his characters sound like Oxford-by-Brooklyn the way some of his contemporaries did […]

This One’s For the Girls

Two Girls Down by Louise Luna

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I don’t usually like mystery/thriller books that have to do with the disappearance and/or murder of children. It’s not for any principled reason; these books just usually make me uncomfortable. Perhaps because the trope of the missing/killed kid still fuels the 1980s paranoia about random strangers who just drive around and scoop up children. Or maybe because it’s just tired and exploitative. Either way, Louise Luna’s Two Girls Down, came highly recommended. It helps that it was written by a woman than a man. Not that […]

The Broken Girls is a creepy page-turner

The Broken Girls by Simone St. James

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After the Sun Down Motel, I went in search of Simone St. James’s other books. The Broken Girls had the best reviews, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to read about teenage girls whose families had abandoned them. I’m glad I checked it out! It wasn’t quite as breathtaking as the Sun Down Motel, but it is really good.  2014: Twenty years ago, Fiona’s older sister, Deb, was murdered by her boyfriend and her body dumped on the grounds of a former boarding school named […]

Throughout Generations

A Long Line of Dead Men by Lawrence Block

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It took me twelve books total to realize how much I love the Matthew Scudder series. But I do. I’m so glad I re-discovered this in the last few months. The early books were just simple whodunnits, no more no less. Competently written yet not necessarily worth the time and effort to invest in the whole series. Yet my thirst for gritty New York tales is almost impossible to slake, so I kept coming back to these. Slowly but surely, Block continued to improve as […]



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