Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Like so many things, this could’ve been better with Charlize Theron in it

1989 (Allie Burns #2) by Val McDermid

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The year is 1989, and journalist Allie Burns isn’t enjoying life. She’s moved from Scotland to Manchester with her girlfriend and fellow journalist Rona. The newspaper she works for has been bought by a media magnate named Ace Lockhart (named in the novel as Rupert Murdoch’s main competitor but for all intents and purposes, he is Rupert Murdoch), which means than rather than write the well-researched think pieces Allie used to do, she is now chasing juicy athlete divorce stories and covering disasters like the […]

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 […]

The Women Come and Go

Insidious Intent (Tony Hill&Carol Jordan #10) by Val McDermid

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A car is set ablaze in a lay-by in the rural north of England. Initially, it is thought that it was left there by a couple of carjackers trying to dispose of it, but upon closer inspection, the body of a dead woman is found inside. Police inspector Carol Jordan, head of a newly minted major crimes unit covering several large cities in the north, investigates the crime and with the help of her friend, criminal psychologist Tony Hill, she tries to stop the killer […]

Busy Bog Bodies

Broken Ground (Karen Pirie #5) by Val McDermid

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In 1944, as World War II is drawing to a close, two men are ordered to destroy army surplus. This includes two motorcycles, shiny and brand-new. The men can’t bring themselves to destroy them, so instead they bury the bikes deep in peat-ground of the Scottish highlands. Years later, the granddaughter of one of the men figures out the location of the bikes and, with the help of a local, they decide to dig them up. They find more than they bargained for; a corpse […]

Autumnal Reading

1979 by Val McDermid

The Survivors by Jane Harper

De Metsiers by Hugo Claus

Normal People by Sally Rooney

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After not having read much for a couple of weeks (work has been hell), I once again found myself in a place with terrible internet connectivity and a pile of books. Worse things have happened, particularly because the books I ended up selecting all turned out to be pretty dang good. 1979 (Val McDermid) **** Allie Burns is a woman in a man’s world. An Oxbridge graduate, she works as a journalist for a small Scottish newspaper. She hopes to make it big but so […]

Blood of Scotland

A Distant Echo by Val McDermid

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It’s crystal clear that I need to read more Val McDermid. A Place of Execution was one of the best things I read in 2021, but I consistently punt on her books. I finally bought 1979with some Christmas money after returning it three times to the library unfinished. I don’t know why, don’t ask me to explain it. She’s very good. Like the other one I read, this is a character driven crime novel with a mystery that’s resolved in a textured way. There are […]



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