Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Lawyer Stuff

The Defense by Steve Cavanagh

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I saw this laughable image/tweet in the time I was reading the book and since it’s close to the plot summary, I figured I’d bless y’all with it. There’s a certain condescension amongst book readers as to how seriously they should take page-turning novels. I often hear the phrase “Turn off your brain for this one!” While there may be some truth to it, most fiction requires elaborations and expansions of the truth. You could read something like The Defense and grouse about how something like that […]

Two women, one plane crash.

The Last Flight by Julie Clark

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Two women meet by chance in an airport, both on the run from their former lives, and decide to swap identities and plane tickets in order to further obscure their trails. One plane crashes and the other doesn’t. This book examines both the fallout from the crash in Claire’s POV (the wife of the famous son of a famous politician, who is fleeing an abusive marriage to said famous son) and the six month lead-up to the crash in Eva’s POV (I won’t spoil what […]

Started November 12th. Finished January 12th. The breaks in reading were NECESSARY

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

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…but the journey was worth it. This book is brutal. If you are sensitive at all to suffering- be it human, animal, generational, cultural- turn away now and do not look back. Four Blackfeet men engage in a bit of last-minute less-than-legal Elk hunting the weekend before Thanksgiving. What happens that day never really leaves them, but what they left behind comes rocketing back into their lives 10 years later. The 10 years since that day have not been easy; the men are plagued by […]

Reading, Reading, Reading

Broken Places by Tracy Clark

The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie

Solos by Kitty Burns Florey

The Lady Upstairs by Halley Sutton

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Finishing off the year right with another round of great crime fiction… Broken Places 4 stars A really good debut novel that’s pure Chicago without being annoying. A little predictable towards the end but well-written nonetheless. Also, much love for featuring black Roman Catholicism, which is a different expression than the commonly mass produced (re:white) Roman Catholicism of crime novels and movies.   The A.B.C. Murders 4 stars This one was about to highlight why I’m not a big Christie fan, despite usually enjoying her novels. Whereas […]

Book that made me go hmmmm…

The Once and Future Spy by Robert Littell

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I am a huge fan of mystery and spy novels, so when I saw this in a Free Little Library I picked it up based on the title alone.  I then read the blurb on the back of the book from a NY Times review which called Littell the American John Le Carré.  I don’t like Le Carré’s work (based on the two books of his that I have read), so it took me a while to decide I was going to read this anyway […]

Second verse same as the first?

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley

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A group of old friends from college go on vacation together every New Year’s Eve. They tell themselves that after the initial awkwardness of reuniting wears off, they realize how much they still have in common and mean to one another. But not New Year’s Eve 2018. The differences have become more pronounced, and their physical and emotional distance reminds them of long-held grievances and hurt feelings. When one of them is found dead, everyone’s a suspect (okay, maybe not the infant). After loving Lucy […]



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