Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Poaching in Yellowstone National Park

The Last Ranger by Peter Heller

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Peter Heller is a local writer who is only one degree of separation away from me: He apparently knows a guy I kind of dated a long time ago. But this slim brush with celebrity is not why I continue to read his books. I enjoy his writing and like his focus on nature. In The Last Ranger (2023), Ren is an enforcement ranger in Yellowstone National Park. He deals with car accidents, campers’ disputes, law enforcement, and poaching. He is a haunted man who hasn’t really […]

Woof.

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

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The Dog Stars is a post-apocalyptic tale of a pilot in North America who goes by the name of Hig. Big Hig, his prepper-turned-survivalist ‘mate’ Bangley, and his dog Jasper have carved out a fairly safe refuge at a regional airport, left empty at the end of the world. They spend their days farming, salvaging, hunting, and going on recon flights around the area. Hig and Bangley have a fractured yet symbiotic relationship that is not without turmoil. Hig’s a big ol’ softy, see, who […]

A little poetry, a little violence

The Painter by Peter Heller

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CBR15Bingo: “You are here” The Painter (2015) by Peter Heller is one of the books I specifically searched out for Cannonball Bingo. Looking for local books, I was doing google searches for the “best books that take place in Colorado” and saw The Painter. I had read The Dog Stars by Heller ten years ago and was impressed, so I was open to reading another book by him. In addition, Heller lives in Denver and the book takes place (at least partly) in the mountains of Colorado, which works perfectly […]

A thriller about grief that only made me cry a little bit

The Guide by Peter Heller

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Peter Heller writes such introspective thrillers. I am not a fisher, and I know very little about the technical terminology related to outdoors activities like hunting, or fishing, or riding horses. At times, it was almost like reading words from another language, and I used context clues to determine that word must refer to a shoe, or that must be another word for a fishing rod. Despite the language barrier, I found myself captivated by this meditation on grief, guilt, mixed with an anti-capitalist thriller […]

The Hollow and Lord Edgware Dies + Audible Originals

The Hollow by Agatha Christie

Lord Edgware Dies by Agatha Christie

See How they Run by Rachel Howzell hall

Stories of the Stalked by Lily Baldwin

Free Billy by Don Winslow

Approval Junkie by Faith Salie

Out of Bounds by Chris Ballard

The Dogs of Venice by Stephen Rowley

Island Nation by Peter Heller

Fragments of a Young Conquistador by Lincoln Michel

Song of the Northwoods by Jessica Huang

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The Hollow – 4/5 Stars This is one of the mid-career Poirot novels, and it’s one of the ones where Poirot begins to revise and critique the ways in which crimes are investigated. We begin with a group of people on an estate swooning and hand-wringing about their wonderful, innocent, and sad friend Gerda, who seems to be married to someone who doesn’t love her. This is one of those Christie novels that takes place on a country estate, like several others, and like others, […]

The River – Peter Heller (2019)

The River by Peter Heller

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CBR13Bingo – The Wilds This is a consummate river novel. There’s been a few of those over the years like Deliverance, Heart of Darkness, and The African Queen. This one shares some of the sensibilities of especially Deliverance, with some atmospheric qualities of nature writers. Two friends from college have decided to spend their summer canoeing, hunting, fishing, and camping in the far Canadian northeast. Early one, they run across two “fat Texans” who are drunk or high, and hear the faint traces of a […]



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