Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency.”

In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad #1) by Tana French

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I can see in this book where everything I loved about The Searcher got its start. However, I am not sad to no longer be in the minds’ eye of Detective Rob Ryan. The narration of In the Woods is entirely in first person, he is telling the reader the story as it happened from somewhere in the near future. He opens the book by announcing that he is an unreliable narrator. It is both true and not, depending on how you define that style […]

Character First

The Trespasser by Tana French

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Tana French’s The Trespasser is more than your standard police procedural. The story is told through police officer Antoinette Conway’s eyes, a furious, wary, excellent cop who has been treated badly by her sexist squad for a long time. Her partner Steve Moran is genial and sharp. He is the only one Antoinette seems to trust, which makes sense given how much she’s been sabotaged by the other cops. Antoinette and Steve catch a murder case that involves a young woman found dead in her […]

“I don’t do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you’re already halfway down.”

Broken Harbor (Dublin Murder Squad, #4) by Tana French

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In one word: Gripping Cannonball Read Bingo: Shelfie Review 2021: Hi. Me again. Hear with more French fervor. Love. Her. I have the latest installment of the Dublin Murder Series on my bookshelf, and in fact, I think I’ve had it for months. But once I read it, I am caught up, and I can’t quite face that. So as a pandemic project I decided to reread all of them to then make my way to the most recent installment. I’m here to report that […]

Wych Way Out

The Wych Elm by Tana French

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Google cannot tell me whether this book is called The Wych Elm or The Witch Elm, but you get the point.  Twentysomething Toby works as a PR-operative for an art gallery somewhere in Dublin. After a night out with friends his apartment is burglarised; Toby catches them in the act and is clobbered on the head with a heavy object. When he wakes up in hospital he is no longer the same. He has a limp, his face droops and he can no longer remember […]

Tana French needs to write more books

The Trespasser by Tana French

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Tana French is one of my favourite authors. I first discovered her books back in 2013 and I’ve been a fan ever since. The Trespasser was the only one I hadn’t read and I put off reading it for months because she just published a book recently (The Searcher) and who knows when she’ll publish her next one. So I savoured it. I’m normally not a huge fan of detective/murder stories. I find many of them formulaic and lazy and I’ve been burnt enough times […]

“The wind blows itself out, and dawn comes to the window cold and still in a clear gold-green.”

The Searcher by Tana French

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I waited to pick up a Tana French novel even though she is highly regarded around these parts. Late last year I commented on narfna’s review that I was hesitant to pick up another author who writes an ongoing series (I’ve got the Inspector Gamache books to contend with) and that’s true enough. But I think another component was that I knew French wrote gritty, hard-boiled crime novels and I just wasn’t in the mood for those, no matter the quality of the writing (the […]



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