Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Delightful stubbornness

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

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A Man Called Ove is about a delightfully stubborn widower in Sweden. He has a strict logic that he applies to the world. He yearns for consistency and routine. Anyone who deviates from the order is likely inefficient and an idiot in his mind. He is suspicious of most things and prefers to abstain from all social things. I enjoyed his rising frustration at the computer store when he attempts to buy a computer. Despite his crankiness, Ove fell in love with a woman named […]

Skål

The Locked Room by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

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I don’t know that the Martin Beck series can possibly be better than The Locked Room. It hits every critical talking point the writing staff have tried to address in previous tales and it becomes something else entirely. It’s almost as if this book is writing through the reader rather than to them. Some series don’t need to be read in sequential order. They may be even better if you don’t do that. I started the Lew Archer series out of order by accident and it’s my […]

Police and Brutality

The Abominable Man by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

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One of the best in an already great series, The Abominable Man grapples with a lot and spares no emotion. At the heart of this offering is what it means for a country to be policed. It’s a discussion that’s been had by a broader swath of Americans since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which though originally inspired by the murder of Trayvon Martin, galvanized the deaths of young black men at the hands of law enforcement. Police brutality in the States has its […]

Eat the Rich

Murder at the Savoy by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö

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Going into reading this series, I knew Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were avowed socialists who wrote these books in large parts as a critique of inequality in Sweden. But while their beliefs do sneak out from time-to-time, they generally ground their mysteries in the tradition of a police procedural as opposed to pedagogy cloaked in mystery drag. That goes out the window with Murder at the Savoy, which is about as didactic of a book as I’ve read from them. There’s no question about it […]

You can smell the slop

The Wolf and the Watchman by Niklas Natt och Dag

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Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review. The older I get, the more frustrated I get with “events”, at least in terms of movies. Don’t really care which Avengers are going to make out whatever Avengers movie is coming out soon. It’s Marvel; the only character never brought to life is Uncle Ben. I am also the type of person who hears about the guy who jumps off a cruise ship into the ocean to see if […]

Eastern Promises

The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell

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I’ve read three Henning Mankell books and each one has left me satisfied, like they are a step above the regular mystery read. I don’t know why I don’t do a deeper dive into his work. Dogs of Riga is another winner and it was inching towards a five-star rating before it fell apart in the last quarter. I’ll get to that. But let me begin by singing the praises of Henning Mankell. In this one, he has his main character spend most of his time […]



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