Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Unfinished Business

How the Dead Speak (Tony Hill & Carol Jordan #11) by Val McDermid

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An old convent is bought by a property development company. Soon, work begins on the grounds, but it’s not long before the skeletal remains of forty young women are discovered. The bones are old – years, sometimes decades – but it begs the question: what, exactly, happened at the convent, where girls with nowhere to go were taken in? Why were the secretly buried, and why did their families receive no word of their passing? The ReMIT team, specialising in serious crime, investigates, though why […]

Debt of Honour

The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carré

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With the United States in steep (and willing) decline globally, surrendering its power on the world stage, I’ve looked to the works of John Le Carré for inspiration. Le Carré’s greatest gift as an espionage writer was chronicling the decline of Great Britain as a world power and doing so with a combination of wistful attitudes and thrilling writing. Yes there’s a lot of talking, a lot of musing in the books and it can take a while to set the stage. But when it […]

What is Yours?

Penance by Eliza Clark

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Penance is an interesting book. When I started it, I thought it’d be one of the best things I read this year: a clever dissection of true crime fandom. And by the end, I couldn’t wait to be done. Even the clever ending didn’t spruce it up for me. I appreciate what Eliza Clark is trying to do: expand on a crime to look at the broader story through the lens of a journalist who we know from the start is unreliable, which requires we approach […]

Magical found families are my cat nip

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna

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After months of work stress, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches was exactly what I needed. This cozy fantasy romance introduces us to Mika Moon, an orphaned witch living in the UK. She meets every quarter in secret places with fellow witches of Britain. They’re not allowed to talk to each other except at these meetings, lest they be discovered and persecuted. Primrose, Mika’s guardian, is the de facto head of the witches who enforces these rules for the greater good. Much to Primrose’s […]

This is a good little mystery that I couldn’t get into

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

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BINGO – Bodies (as in, dead ones) The Thursday Murder Club is a group of amateur-detective pensioners who all live at Cooper’s Chase retirement community. The Club consists of Ibrahim, Ron, Elizabeth, and newcomer Joyce. Their usually sleepy community is suddenly rocketed to the forefront of police attention when a handful of individuals connected to the community are murdered. The Thursday Murder Club is also on the case. They are using a lifetime of experience and ample time to dig up clues, identify suspects, and […]

Missed it byyyyy thatmuch

Sweet Fruit, Sour Land by Rebecca Ley

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I know I’ve mentioned a few (hundred) times that I’m a sucker for the Man Booker Prize, and I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of those lists for many years. I’ve finally started paying more attention to others, too, particularly the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Awards and the Women’s Prize, and I also found the cheeky Not-the-Booker Prize awarded by The Guardian from a blend of votes by the public and a judging panel. I thought the 2018 winner, Rebecca Ley’s Sweet Fruit, Sour Land, […]



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