Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

California Love

The Drowning Pool by Ross Macdonald

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I’ve developed a recent habit of revisiting old books; some favorites, others not. I wanted to see how they held up after all this time and if my notions of them were still true. Many list The Drowning Pool as one of Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar)’s greatest works. I am a Lew Archer diehard. I’ve said many times in this space that it’s my favorite detective mystery series of all-time. But I’m also lucky that I unintentionally began it later in the series, when Macdonald had already […]

To Have and Have Not

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Black Money was one of the first books I read after the 2016 election. At the time, I was still making my way through the Lew Archer series. Like many people horrified at the election’s results, my mind was in a fog and I came to Black Money simply because it was the next book up. Although my brief Goodreads review says I liked it and thought it one of the best in the Archer series, I retain little memory of it given the time in which it […]

What a Bastard

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Grizzled ex-cop P.I. Lew Archer is called in to the principal’s office when a boarding school student runs away after less than a week in class. But this is no ordinary school. It’s something of a school for wayward boys, and the runaway in question had just apparently stolen his neighbor’s car and wrecked it. Archer sinks his teeth into the case when no one will give him a straight answer, not even the boy’s distraught parents. Ignoring orders to cease his investigation, Archer stumbles […]

Murder from the Inside Out

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Ross Macdonald’s plots are just as intricate as Raymond Chandler’s, but somehow he manages to tie it all together with no loose ends. (Who did kill that chauffeur anyway?) The only way I can imagine Macdonald putting together his mysteries is by writing a straightforward novel without a detective, then putting all the events in the wrong order for his detective, ex-cop Lew Archer to discover one at a time. All the staples of the Lew Archer series are on display here, the post-war California […]

Urban Decay

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The improbably-named Johnny Weather hitchhikes into his unnamed hometown for the first time in years only to find that his father is dead and a stepmother he’s never met has inherited everything. Even worse is that his father’s murder remains unsolved due to a corrupt political machine and a compliant police department. Taking matters into his own fists, Weather brawls and shoots his way to a solution, plunging further and further into the rotten core of the city his father helped begrime. This is another […]

You Said You Were An Actress

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I’ve apparently decided to read all of Ross Macdonald’s works this year (stay tuned) which means diving into his non-Archer novels. The Ferguson Affair hardly misses the pugnacious Lew Archer, with attorney Bill Gunnarson making for a suitable investigator. If Gunnarson seems to go an awfully long way for his client it’s an acceptable stretching of artistic license. Gunnarson is a private attorney asked to represent a young nurse caught trying to sell stolen jewelry. When he tries to verify her story about being given […]



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