Friday, November 4, 2011

Blood Country - Review

I downloaded the electronic edition of Blood Country when I found it as a freebie (a short-lived occurrence) on an e-book site. The printed edition had been published by Walker Publishing Company, Inc. in 1999, and I might have enjoyed the book a bit more if I'd read that version.

Story: Claire Watkins is living in a small Wisconsin town with her daughter, Meg, after her husband's death--an unsolved murder. She works for the county sheriff's department and enjoys small town police work after having been a detective in the Twin Cities. But life changes on two fronts when her elderly neighbor is murdered in his yard; then her daughter admits she saw the man who drove the truck that ran over her father. Claire calls her ex-partner to help her with the new evidence about her husband's murder while she works on solving the small town killing.

Mary Logue is a very good wordsmith; the descriptions and sense of place were well crafted. Character differences made all the people in the story easy to recognize. For me, however, there were too many points of view; some where internal thoughts that could have been better served to come out in dialog with the principal character. Because of this, the story bogged down in many places, and the tension and action didn't live up to the title Blood Country.

Most aggravating were the many errors in the text. It was obvious the e-book layout hadn't been vetted. face most times came out as fece; missing punctuation was jarring as well as sections of dialogue that weren't separated into paragraphs. I find it very disappointing when a publishing company (in this case, Tyrus Books – F+W Media, Inc, Adams Media [all the same, I guess]) sloughs the work of creating a good final product. And they have the nerve to charge more than $7.00 for it! Hopefully, they'll go in and make the corrections--an advantage to e-books that more publishers should utilize.

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