Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

An entertaining read for Women’s History month

The Alewives: A Plague-Era Tale of Murder, Friendship and Fine Ale by Elizabeth R. Andersen

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Another shout out to Narfna for putting this on my radar. I am your literary stalker! This was a very entertaining murder mystery set in an era that has always fascinated me and featuring a set of unusual sleuths. I’d never read any of Elizabeth Andersen’s books before, but I gather that historical fiction is her thing and setting a murder in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death had me from the get go. Even better, the sleuths in this novel, which I hope […]

Alaska Alas

City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita

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When I looked up books similar to True Detective: Night Country, I couldn’t have known at the time that this would be what I was searching for. Alaska. Remote setting. Layered mystery. Suspicious locals. Detective with a troubled past. Check, check, check and check. This was one where I hurt myself trying to read and absorb as quickly as possible to get to the next page. Not surprising given that Iris Yamashita is a screenwriter. But having had mixed feelings in the past on screenwriters-turned-novelists, Yamashita […]

Maude Horton’s (Not So) Glorious (Semi) Revenge

Maude Horton's Glorious Revenge by Lizzie Pook

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Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review. Okay, first, I’m going to take the chance here that I’m going to sound ungrateful, but I mean this in the spirit of genuine feedback. Only giving out a PDF file for your ARC does not really encourage readers. It is very hard to read, limiting the devices on which it can be read. I could only read on my phone, which is a guaranteed recipe for […]

Not For The Children

The Legacy by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

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Having written a ton on the problematic nature of villainous adoptees in crime fiction, I went into Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s book with a healthy dose of skepticism that she could pull this off. I appreciate the authors work, having enjoyed The Last Ritual. I think she creates interesting characters and does a great job of bringing Iceland to life. But I kept hearing how twisty and shocking this was. And it involved three adoptees at the heart of the story. So my antennae was up. Did she […]

A Lineage of Madness

The Noh Mask Mystery by Akimitsu Takagi

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An aspiring mystery writer and his childhood friend must join forces to solve the mystery of a string of deaths in a prominent Japanese family that may be the result of an inherited curse. I’ve always enjoyed reading works in translation – they seem to bring you closer to the place in which they are set – but I definitely haven’t read many genre works. As such, I was intrigued by the prospect of this locked room murder mystery, written in 1949 but never before […]

“A podcaster has decided to ruin my life, so I’m buying a chicken.”

Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review. Listen, when it does the thing it does thing, so I had to round up to five stars because it’s so rare that I truly love a thriller. So many of them sound exactly the same, and have the exact same premise, and don’t really do much interesting beyond trying to shock the hell out of you (which I find uninteresting as the basis for a book). This […]



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