Just finished Bruen's latest Brant book. It starts with Brant
getting shot. Anyone who knows Brant knows there would be no
absence of suspects.
It might be one of the best of the series, but the proofing
and editing really hurt it. First of all, it's riddled with
correctly spelled wrong words (for instance, that for than)
that are becoming all too frequent with the increasing
over-reliance on spellcheck without human proofers looking at
context. However, the general editing is also sloppy, from
small things like side characters seeming to be introduced
every time they enter (for example, although Andrews had
already been in numerous earlier scenes, on p. 160: "Andrews,
the new gung-ho WPC, asked . . .") to big things, like slight
jumps in chronology and an orphan chapter that seems like it
should have been dropped, or followed up on. At the end of
Chapter 17, Porter asks the American Homeland Security Agent,
Wallace, to accompany him on an interview of a dead suspect's
girlfriend
(to find out who had hired the suspect). They get into a
department issue Volvo and drive off. There is never another
mention of the interview or the girlfriend, nor of the dead
suspect, for that matter. It's like this scene never
happened. After an intervening chapter about another
character, we find Porter sitting in the canteen when Wallace
invites him along for a visit to a terror suspect. They hop
in Wallace's BMW and drive off. Now both of those things
could have happened, but it reads more like sloppy editing
where the earlier scene was supposed to be dropped (part of
the later one is essential to the following plot).
I still enjoyed the book quite a bit, and definitely
recommend it to fans of the series, but it deserves better
attention to editing.
Mark
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