Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Cannonballing with teenage murder detectives.

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder (A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, #1) by Holly Jackson

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I was so pleasantly surprised by this one. It was an excellent choice to be reading on my birthday* to make up for the fact that my body is slowly succumbing to the forces of entropy. *Which was now over a month ago, whoopsie. I’m wary with YA these days, especially contemporary YA, because I want a good story and good characters, not plot gimmicks and sensationalism, and books that are read by people like I used to be as a teenager (no discernment whatsoever). […]

Hopefully the last one of these I three-star for a while.

A Better Man (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #15) by Louise Penny

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Not too much to say about this one. Not one of my favorites of this series. Parts of it I really liked, and parts of it I really did not. It’s been over a month now, and I’ve read 1,000 books since then, so I’m really not remembering specifics here. I remember there was a missing woman, and that plotline was interesting. I wished I was more interested in the plotline where Gamache comes back to be the head of the homicide department, a move […]

Charm, Shame, Desire, Justice, Pride, and Pain

The Bone Orchard by Sara A Mueller

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Charm is a bone witch, a prisoner, and a whore. Alongside the boneghosts that she grew in her laboratory, she runs a brothel at Orchard House. When her keeper the old emperor lies dying, poisoned, he charges her with safeguarding the empire and finding out which of his sons was his killer. Firstly, that cover is utterly beautiful. Now that this important matter is acknowledged, let us go on into the story. I saw a lot of complaints that it was difficult to understand, for […]

Does Crime Pay?

Boss of Bosses: The Fall of the Godfather: The FBI and Paul Castellano by Andris Kurins and Joseph F. O'Brien

Sacred by Dennis Lehane

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I hadn’t meant to review these books together but I finished Sacred sooner than I anticipated and it just makes sense to cover them both in one review…   Boss of Bosses I just finished rewatching The Godfather in honor of its 50th anniversary and I decided to tackle this one because the agents applied the movie title as a sobriquet for Paul Castellano, the mob boss of the Gambino crime family who is perhaps most famous as being the guy in John Gotti’s way that got killed in […]

The Lynx Knows

Secret Identity: A Novel by Alex Segura

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I waited for this book for months. Months! And for the most part, it was worth the wait. It’s very good. I’ve read other stuff from Alex Segura, from his Pete Fernandez mystery books to the first edition of his Black Ghost graphic novel series. I love his interest in how journalism, urban corruption, and dogged investigative work come together to tell an entertaining tale. It’s right up my alley. This ambitious novel set in the comic industry in 1970s New York City could fall flat for trying to […]

“If you’re on the list, someone wants you dead”

Nine Lives by Peter Swanson

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I can count on Peter Swanson for a solid mystery and Nine Lives, his latest book, is no exception.  The premise is borrowed from Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, which is mentioned several times in the book.  (Including the alternate titles the Christie story had, one which is considered offensive) Nine people receive a list of nine names in the mail, including their own.  They don’t know each other and nobody is sure what the link is between these nine lives. Then, like […]



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