Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Get a New Line of Work?

Bitter Falls (Stillhouse Lake Book #4) by Rachel Caine

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I am a sucker for a series with a strong, capable woman.  Add the fact that she’s a mom on a mission? I’m alway sold.  I’m easy…always have been.  To catch you up, the Stillhouse Lake series is about a woman, Gina Royal, who comes home to find out that her husband was a serial killer and that he had been killing people under her nose for years (in a sound proof hobby room in the garage).  People did not believe that she wasn’t aiding […]

An old favorite

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

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I read all of Agatha Christie’s books in the years of elementary through high school. Hercule Poirot heavily influenced my idea of what a Frenchman should be, and I read all of his lines in my head through the filter of my French teacher in 5th grade (Miss Marple sounds like my grandmother, but stuffier, in my head). I haven’t picked up one of her mysteries for at least twenty years but my daughter has recently started to be interested in mysteries so I was […]

Two Duds

The Wounded and the Slain by David Goodis

Doctor Lovebeads by Gary Reilly

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How much does it suck when you read two books concurrent with one another by authors you normally like…and they turn out to be complete duds? I took time to write this review after finishing both books to wonder if it was just me. Nope. Both were not good and very close to bad. The Wounded and the Slain There are good ideas in this David Goodis noir tale: ideas about marriage, accountability, colonialism, loss, sense of place and justice. But they’re buried underneath Goodis’ […]

A Serviceable Mystery

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

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I love a good mystery. I can tear through an absorbing mystery in a day, but I slow down for certain mysteries because of the depth of the characters.  While Case Histories moves at a decent clip, the characters are sketched with more mannerisms and exposition than depth. To her credit, though, author Kate Atkinson is quite good at portraying the many forms of grief and loss. While I did not find this mystery very satisfying in the end, I do appreciate the effort that went in […]

Entertaining enough, but disappointing

Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz

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 Warning: While I try to avoid any outright spoilers, you might want to skip this review if you are planning on reading this novel. Summary: I found Moriarty entertaining enough, but compared to the fabulous House of Silk, it’s downright disappointing. Kind of like how Cars would be a decent enough animated movie from any other studio, but from the studio that created Toy Story, WALL-E, and The Incredibles, you’re like “Lame, Pixar.” Now, the review: I’m sitting in a little Japanese restaurant eating my lunch, […]

When reading replaces all of your plans for the weekend

The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell

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I picked up The Family Upstairs one morning intending to read a few pages to see what it was like. I put it back down again 200 pages later only to go to sleep, and the carried on in the same fashion the next day. Libby has just turned 25 and has inherited a house in Chelsea from the family she never knew – as a baby she’d been found in a crib with the bodies of her birth parents and another adult apparently dead […]



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