Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Made

Blanche On The Lam by Barbara Neely

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There’s a sort of condescension glommed onto the (mostly white) marketers of Black creatives which holds that some sort of fictional media by them with themes of racial prejudice blocking the hero’s path makes it the next Get Out. Get Out‘s a great movie that deserves its laudations but Black writers have been using genres to address the racism they feel for a long time. Barbara Neely does that here. Strip it of its context and it’s a cozy mystery: a maid solving a small […]

A Mysterious Introduction to Agatha Christie

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

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Having never read an Agagtha Christie book before, I decided it was only appropriate to begin with her first Poirot mystery, rather than a more well known title like Murder on the Orient Express. The reader follows narrator Arthur Hastings, a soldier recently released on sick leave from the Western Front during WW2. He runs into an old friend, John Cavendish, who invites him to stay at his families sprawling estate, Styles Court. There, Hastings is reintroduced to several characters: Emily Inglethorp, John’s stepmother Mary […]

Scudder Re-Read #1: The Sins of the Fathers

The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block

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For the next fourteen or so months (save February and March), I’m going to do a Matthew Scudder re-read. I love these books and I’ve been aching to revisit them. If I’m fortunate to live for a few years, I may do this with favored series. It’s good to revisit them, not as much too see what you missed the first time but to gain a deeper perspective of what drew you to them in the first place. The Sins of the Fathers is not the […]

Sigh…Vampires

No Dominion by Charlie Huston

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On Goodreads, there is a reviewer named Kemper (an alias). He has since retired, which is a shame because I love his reviews. He enjoys a lot of the same crime fiction I do. Anyway, Kemper had this tic I once found annoying in that he would write reviews by doing faux interviews with the authors of the books he read. He usually did this when he read something that wasn’t so good. I preferred reading his regular reviews. However, as I’ve written so many […]

“He laughs and laughs. My, how he laughs.”

The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle by T.L. Huchu

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Ropa should be on cloud nine, helping organize the Society of Skeptical Enquirers’ biennial conference and hobnobbing with all the bigwigs of Scottish magic. But when she’s left scrambling to investigate a politically charged theft, she begins to wonder if the world of magic is more trouble than it’s worth. This is the third book in the Edinburgh Nights series, which follows teenage ghostalker Ropa as she investigates magical crimes in a politically uneasy Scotland. In this book, we seem to shift from the individual […]

Second Chances Sometimes Are Worth It

The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson

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I had flipped through The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England in a bookstore and decided it didn’t look great. I’m not a big fan of first-person narrating, and I saw a now mildly spoilery part about 2/3 of the way in that seemed dumb, so I put is back. Fast-forward about 6 months and I see the same nook at the library. On a whim, I decided to give it another chance. I’m actually kind of glad that I did. Our narrator wakes […]



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