Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Gone and Forgotten

Have You Seen Me? by Kate White

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Slowly but surely, and of course, unhealthily, we begin to emerge from isolation due to the pandemic. I doubt I’ll be keeping up my book-every-one-or-two-days ratio until the inevitable second wave. So I’m beginning to cast aside the stack of stuff I was going to read to pass the time. This is probably the last one. I got it off one recommendation or another, can’t even remember now where it was. And that seems kind of appropriate because I finished this last night and I’m […]

Damages

Clean Hands by Patrick Hoffman

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Patrick Hoffman’s Every Man A Menace was one of the best things I read last year; a layered, eagle’s eye view of a major drug transaction from street level to boss level. I couldn’t put it down and when I heard he was coming out with one that covered corporate espionage in New York City, I wasn’t going to hesitate getting my hands on a copy of it. Clean Hands doesn’t hit those high notes but it’s pretty good in its own right. While its formatted differently […]

…but you’re bringing me down.

New Yorked by Rob Hart

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I need to start with the good because there’s a lot of goodwill built in this book or else I wouldn’t have been able to stomach it for 20 pages. Rob Hart knows New York City. Knows it. Not in a way a smarmy lifer traipsing through endless aristocratic watering holes knows it. But the way a native does. Favorite bars, corner stores, slice stops…he brings it alive in a real way. I could see and feel the city, one I’m missing right now with everything shut […]

Nuns and Prostitutes

Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

A Time to Scatter Stones by Lawrence Block

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I knocked out two quick books in the last day, neither of which won me over. Mariette in Ecstasy Judging by other reviews of this book, it appears as if I’m taking a rare middle ground stance. I thought the prose was beautiful and the scene descriptions lush and full. I enjoyed several individual pages. But with a big cast of characters and a central one the writer makes intentionally mysterious, none of it resonates. Plotting is marginal at best. It just lurches from one […]

This Time, It Stuck

City of Margins by William Boyle

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This is the third William Boyle book I’ve tried. I still can’t get past the first 50 pages of Gravesend, as I found the characters to be uninteresting. The Lonely Witness was enjoyable enough but kind of a mess. Boyle, like George Pelecanos, writes character-driven crime tales that focus on their distinct urban neighborhoods. I always feel like I should enjoy both of their books more than I do. They always feel like I’m dropping in the middle episode of a well-produced television show that I’m unfamiliar with. […]

A Twofer

The Night and the Music by Lawrence Block

Top of the Heap by Erle Stanley Gardner

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I knocked out two books over the weekend, both good enough in their own ways.   The Night and the Music 4 stars I’ve never really liked short stories but I like Matthew Scudder and, aside from a novella, this is all that I have left to get from his tale. And I enjoyed each story on its own in some way. The mystery ones were fun but the ones where we see Scudder’s humanity are often better. I do wish the Mick Ballou ones were longer […]



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