Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Of Lies and Men

Girl, Forgotten by Karin Slaughter

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On a balmy spring eve, eighteen year old Emily Vaughn zips herself into her prom dress with some difficulty, then walks over to her high school to confront the people she thought were her friends. It’s 1982 and Emily is about eight months pregnant. Reviled by her classmates, she is soon thrown out of the prom. Emily disappears on her way home; her dead body is found in a dumpster next morning.  Some forty years later, US Marshall Andrea Oliver, fresh off the academy, is […]

Worth your time, but maybe not the lingering headache

The Treatment by Mo Hayder

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Crime fiction is an odd thing. Visit your average thriller-horror-Facebook group and you’ll regularly find people looking for books that portray the extremes of human behaviour. “The sicker the better”, as they put it. Weirdly, The Treatment by Mo Hayder is not one that pops up very often – possibly because it’s about 20 years old – but in all honesty, this book is intense. We didn’t believe in Trigger Warnings in 2022 but this book could do with a couple of them.  On a […]

Vir2ous if O4ly Long

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

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It’s the mid eighties, the land of Stranger Things nostalgia, and eight year old Victoria ‘Vic’ McQueen (aka The Brat) has just discovered something interesting: if she hops on her bike and cycles through to a certain spot in the woods by the river, a magic bridge will appear. Whenever something has been lost all Vic has to do is cross the bridge and she will end up where the lost object is. But something else is lost as well: across the country, young children […]

Only the Lonely

Find Her by Lisa Gardner

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Seven years ago, young college student Florence ‘Flora’ Dane was kidnapped by a truck driver who keeps her as his personal toy for over four hundred days. Though she’s eventually found she struggles to find her place in society, to reform the bond with her family. In search of meaning, she sets out to find other missing women by going to bars, getting drunk, allowing men to pick her up and then turning into a fury when they try to hurt her. She’s clever, inventive, […]

cbr12bingo – white whale (and BLACKOUT!!!! now I if only I could blackout and forget that this book exists!)

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

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Lolita is absolutely vile, and I cannot be convinced otherwise. Yes, Humbert Humbert is the worst, and yes, we are supposed to know that he is a monster, but good lord this book is venerated from here to kingdom come as if it is the be all-end all of twentieth century literature. The edition that I picked up, which was published in 1997 as a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the original pressing- and is still the one in current re-prints and mass circulation, STILL […]

With Friends like These…

The Silent Wife by Karin Slaughter

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Allow me to give you a brief summary of the plot of THE SILENT WIFE: it’s pretty much rapey rapey stabby stabby, blood, guts, gore galore. It’s that kind of book. If you can get past that (and if you can’t, I won’t hold it against you) there’s decent writing and rounded characters, a bit of character assassination, a couple of plot holes and a whole lotta cops being unprofessional.  In The Silent Wife, Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents Will Trent and Faith Mitchell and […]



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