Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Last Call

A Drop of the Hard Stuff by Lawrence Block

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I know there’s a book of short stories and a novella to read but this is about as fitting of a conclusion to the Matthew Scudder saga as any. Block’s novel is a throwback to Scudder in the early days of his sobriety, and like his previous throwback novel When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, this too feels like a self-contained story and not an author trying to do a cash-grab prequel rife with easter eggs. In this one, Matt is struggling with his sobriety almost as much […]

Pulp Fiction

The Serialist by David Gordon

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Back in the day, I’m talking the 20s-50s, writers used to make their bread by writing pulp tales on the side while working on their main works. They would release the former under pseudonyms. Hard boiled mysteries, campy science fiction, erotica, plenty of great writers plied their trade this way. Lawrence Block wrote dozens of trashy erotic novels under a variety of names before transitioning to mainstream mystery fare. The Serialist is a tribute to that form of writing and for that, I almost love the […]

Quarantine Reading

Conviction by Denise Mina

Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death by Donald Westlake

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Been doing a lot of reading to pass the time during the quarantine. I finished these two books back to back, both were good in their own respective ways. So here are the reviews… Conviction I didn’t mean for this to be my first Denise Mina book. I’ve tried and failed twice to get into Garenthill. But the premise seemed too good to pass up and I thought it would be a fun pleasure read. It starts off rocky. The main character, whose perspective we get first […]

The Killers

All The Flowers Are Dying by Lawrence Block

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I really do truly love this series. I didn’t expect to tear through it as fast as I did and now I’ve only got a few to read. Stupid pandemic. I’m also glad I read this series when I did. Had I gone through it in my early-20s, when I read my first Scudder, I don’t think I would have appreciated the solemn nature of Block’s famous detective, nor the shoe leather detective work he is known for. This is in many ways the last […]

Park Avenue Summer by Renee Rosen

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Park Avenue Summer is the fictionalized story of the revamp of Cosmopolitan magazine in the early 1960s. The novel is full of glamorous fashion, fancy lunches and dinner dates, and other glimpses of high society. Unfortunately, the plot fell flat for me. Our protagonist Alice is your typical small-town girl who somehow lands a position as a secretary for Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown through a series of meet-cutes. There is some mystery of Alice’s family, but I confess I have already forgotten the mystery […]

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's CBR12 Review No:15 · Genres: Fiction · Tags: , , , , ·

The Bodies Are Buried

Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh

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I used to see Shovel Ready at bookstores and think to myself “Oh, that seems like an interesting read.” And before I spent money on it, I would eventually remember that I already owned it on Kindle, buying it for a deal back in the days where I used to fastidiously track Kindle deals. Yet for all the time I’ve owned it, I’ve never really been interested in reading it. The premise is one up my alley: hit man operating in a dystopic New York City but I […]



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