Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Queen, Tangerine, Kind of a Bore

The Chinese Orange Mystery by Ellery Queen

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The Chinese Orange Mystery is the perfect ammunition for people who don’t like mysteries. It goes all-in on all of the most annoying tropes of mystery novels, the ones that drive non-fans nuts. The characters are paper-thin, the dialogue is stilted and almost entirely expository, the plotting is entirely consumed by the puzzle without any consideration of the reality of murder. The detective, Ellery Queen, is an insufferable fop who refuses to ever disclose what he is thinking or who he suspects of the crime. […]

I’m so glad your first historical romance in several years was actually GOOD, Ms. Long!

Lady Derring Takes a Lover by Julie Anne Long

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From Goodreads: A mistress. A mountain of debt. A mysterious wreck of a building. Delilah Swanpool, Countess of Derring, learns the hard way that her husband, “Dear Dull Derring,” is a lot more interesting—and perfidious—dead than alive. It’s a devil of an inheritance, but in the grand ruins of the one building Derring left her, are the seeds of her liberation. And she vows never again to place herself at the mercy of a man. But battle-hardened Captain Tristan Hardy is nothing if not merciless. […]

A disappointing end to a promising series

The Cthulhu Casebooks - Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove

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Endings are always difficult. Wrapping up a series based on someone else’s original work, doubly so (a fact all Game of Thrones fans learned the hard way this year). This book concludes Lovegrove’s trilogy of placing Holmes into a Lovecraftian universe and the results are not that great. The fist difficulty is with the source material. Doyle only returned to Holmes reluctantly, and the stories of Holmes towards the end did not have the same energy or enthusiasm as the earlier works. Yes, Lovegrove incorporates […]

Horrors of the Road

Alice Isn't Dead by Joseph Fink

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I heard about Alice Isn’t Dead in a review, I think maybe NPR. It sounded interesting so I picked it up. What I noticed quickly but hadn’t realized at first is that the author, Joseph Fink, is one of the Welcome to Night Vale guys; this tells you a lot about the tone and general type of story to expect if you’re familiar with either the podcast (I am not) or the first novel (which I’ve read). The novel was more openly horror than I […]

Often those that criticize others reveal what he himself lacks

The Rumor by Lesley Kara

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Please note that I received this book for free via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review. This book will be released on June 18, 2019.  So I liked the general idea on how a rumor can catch fire and burn innocent people. However, I think Kara didn’t go far enough with it. Also some of the book read as repetitive after a while with Joanna thinking everyone was the child killer Sally McGowan in hiding. And then we have the reveal (which […]

Two Types of Breakdown

The Breakdown by B.A. Paris

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I do have to say that I liked parts of the book. I think the biggest reason why I only gave it 3 stars was that Cass seemed beyond ridiculous and naive at times. Can we get a strong female character in a suspense book for once who doesn’t do things like go out into the dark in search of a killer? We women do have common sense. Also it didn’t make a lot of sense to me why she didn’t want to go to […]



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