Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Bodies, bodies, bodies, but make it ancient Egypt

Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie

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The place is Thebes, the year is 2000 B.C. and the bodies are piling up! Death Comes as the End is an Agatha Christie mystery set in ancient Egypt; it is the only historical mystery Christie wrote, and the only one to feature entirely non-European characters. The novel kicks off with the family patriarch, Imhotep, returning home to Thebes (modern day Luxor) with a new concubine, Nofret. Nofret, who is decades younger than her new partner, is beautiful but cruel. She quickly antagonizes the rest […]

Well-written but not for me.

I'm the Girl by Courtney Summers

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Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review. I don’t think Courtney Summers is for me. I’ve tried three of her books now. This is an extremely well-written and timely young adult thriller that is supposedly about the death of a young girl found on the side of the road, but it’s really about how the world is built to use up pretty young women and undermine their self-worth, and what that looks like. The main […]

Memory Whole

A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham

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Stacy Willingham doesn’t imbue a Louisiana-based novel with enough Louisiana-ness but that’s about the only real complaint I have of her stellar debut effort here. As a frequent mystery/thriller/crime reader, I know all the tricks and tells. I know when I’m about to be duped. I generally know who the killer is early on. There’s just only so many ways a writer can retell the same story. This is why I find myself more often interested in the whydunnit than the who- or howdunnit. What […]

“The thing is, and maybe I’m biased by all those years I’ve spent in fictional realms built on deceit, I don’t trust narrators any more than I trust the actual people in my life. We never get the whole truth, not from anybody.” #CBRBINGO – Elephant

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

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This was the first of two extremely entertaining thrillers that I read by Peter Swanson in 2022. I fear I may have read his best work now, so I’m not sure if I’ll be checking out any more of his stuff, but I can absolutely recommend Eight Perfect Murders as a stand-out thriller (along with The Kind Worth Killing). Holy shit, was this thing a page-turner. So the plot here is that bookshop owner Malcolm Kershaw, years ago, compiled a list of literature’s most perfect […]

“You must be patient with me, dear Cae, as I learn to inhabit myself.” #CBRBINGO – Bodies

A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows

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When I first finished this in July and gave it five stars, I predicted that most people wouldn’t love it as much as I did, and I was right. It also unfortunately came out at the same time as Alexandra Rowland’s A Taste of Gold and Iron, which is pretty similar in story and theme (I haven’t read it yet, though I do have it out from the library), and most people have preferred it to A Strange and Stubborn Endurance. I think this is […]

“You’ve done enough poking around, this is getting stupid. You’re not some kind of pregnant Miss Marple.”

The It Girl by Ruth Ware

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It was perfectly fine! But I still don’t get the Ruth Ware obsession that some people have. Our “It Girl” is April Coutts-Cliveden, who is murdered her freshman year at Oxford, and who had “that thing”. The main character and narrator is her roommate and “best friend”, Hannah, who has experienced ten years of PTSD and harassment from journalists and the public because she was the one who found April’s body, and it was her testimony that sealed the conviction of the murderer, John Neville, […]



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