Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A literary mystery where the stuff on the side is more interesting than the main course.

Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman

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I feel like this book proves how diverse the crime/mystery genre can be in terms of style and theme, and it proves that by not really being something I loved. I love mysteries, unsolved crimes being solved, themes of racial and gender equality, historical fiction mysteries, books about writers and journalists, and stories about women breaking free of their expected gender roles. And yet, I didn’t love this, even though it features all of those things. I like my crime and mystery books either to […]

An interesting failure.

True Crime Story by Joseph Knox

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Thanks to Netgalley and Recorded Books for the audio ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review. This was an impulse request from Netgalley because I thought it was a true crime story, as one might expect from the title. It, my friends, is not. It is a fictional thriller/mystery written sort of in the style of a true crime book. I’ve never, ever seen an actual true crime book structured like this, though. It has more elements of an oral history or filmed documentary […]

Merry Christmas!

The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

The Girl With the Long Green Heart by Lawrence Block

Cold Shot to the Heart by Wallace Stroby

Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League by Britni de la Cretaz and Lyndsey D'Arcangelo

All Her Little Secrets by Wanda M. Morris

Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune and Misfortune of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty by Jonathan Pearson

The Blonde on the Street Corner by David Goodis

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Merry Christmas to all who celebrate! Having been busy with Christmas prep, avoiding Delta and Omicron, and other various things, I haven’t had the time to write long, 250+ reviews for these books. I figured I’d just cram them all here since I know I won’t finish Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate before New Year’s Eve. The Fortress of Solitude *** This clears the 3-star threshold but just barely. I appreciate what Lethem is trying to do here and I usually enjoy his work. But this was a […]

The weakest one of these in a while.

Kingdom of the Blind (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #14) by Louise Penny

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Lots of mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand, I really liked the main conceit of the plot, that this old woman makes Gamache, Myrna, and a strange young man named Benedict the liquidators of her will, despite that none of them knew her. The woman, who called herself the Baroness, had a strange and interesting past, and as often happens in these books, a murder occurs. The B-plot of the book follows Cadet Amelia Choquet after she is expelled from the academy […]

Officer Involved

You Can Die Trying by Gar Anthony Haywood

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I’ve been going through some of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series this past year. One thing I’ve written about it is my concern of how Connelly walks to the edge of police criticism but then draws back because he needs his Harry Bosch character to be “good,” even when Harry is bending and breaking laws to solve cases that apparently only he can solve. I like Connelly a lot, I really do. But reading Gar Anthony Haywood’s take on systemic racism and police brutality in You […]

She’s Not Afraid to Catch Feelings

Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest

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I was really excited to get my hands on this. It had good reviews and its quirky nature seemed up my alley. And it…mostly met expectations. Let’s unpack… For all intents and purposes, this is a cozy mystery and I don’t usually do cozies. The relentlessly sunny outlook despite the presence of a dead body, the sexless flirting and banter, the stuffy settings and predictable plots. But even though this has some of that, it was written by a younger person who isn’t trying too […]



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