Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Chilling.

Snow by John Banville

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It’s impossible for me to review this novel without providing SPOILERS, so read at your own peril.  Rural Ireland, 1957. Detective St. John Strafford (with an R) has been summoned to a country estate in the south-east of Ireland, where a Catholic priest has been found dead in the house of a Protestant land owner. The real kicker: the priest has been castrated. It’s December and the countryside is cloaked in a thick blanket of snow that chokes out sound and hides evidence. Under the […]

Trigger warning. Also, spoilers.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

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I don’t consider myself particularly well-read. I’ve never read Faulkner. Only read The Great Gatsby last year (or the year before, I don’t remember). I’ve read Hemingway once, and didn’t particularly like The Old Man and the Sea. I’ve never read Austen, or Waugh, or Virginia Woolf, or Pynchon, or countless other important literary figures. But I’ve long flirted with the idea of being comfortable with books enjoyed by well-educated people with posh British accents who casually insert French into everyday conversation. (For the record, […]

I Hate Sara Linton, Part Infinity

Genesis by Karin Slaughter

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On a dark, quiet night in the Georgian countryside, just outside of Atlanta, an older couple drives in silence, both lost in thought, when suddenly a nude woman runs into their car. Her injuries are horrific and can’t be explained by the car crash alone. But what is she doing alone in the forest at night? And why isn’t she wearing any clothes?  Genesis is the third book in Karin Slaughter’s Will Trent series. It’s also where she re-introduces characters from her Grant County series […]

It’s All About The Feeeeemaaaaales

Perfect Crime by Helen Fields

The Donor by Clare Mackintosh

Fractured by Karin Slaughter

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The Perfect Crime (Helen Fields) *** Stephen Berry is having a rough night. Or a rough life, really; he cannot seem to get his bipolar disorder under control and his long-suffering girlfriend has left him. Desperate for some quiet, he intents to jump off a bridge, but a suicide counsellor who happens to be nearby intervenes. Stephen is quietly grateful, but then his body is found dead a few weeks later at the bottom of a tall tower. The cause of death seems like a […]

This is the slasher send-up I wanted

My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

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TW: abuse, alcoholism, self-harm, suicide BINGO: COLD [a portion of the story takes place in the frozen Idaho winter; also there are some cold-blooded murders] Jade is obsessed with horror movies. Specifically she loves slashers. She knows everything there is to know about the movies, the plots, the directors, the film-making process, everything. It is her entire life and personality, to a fault. She doesn’t have much else to do in a small town in Proofrock, Idaho. She even weaves in her slasher obsession into her […]

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 […]



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