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Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo, Scribd, Thalia, Smashwords, Mondadori, Angus & Robertson, Indigo (Chapters), and Bol.de

Battered*

Needs All Levels of Editing

I love a good culinary mystery, especially one that includes recipes that sound yummy (like this one has); unfortunately, this isn’t one of them. The language seemed oddly stilted, with phrases that we wouldn’t typically use (like “Edith tightened her lips”–making me visualize Edith and a screwdriver!) and word choice that was meant to be strong (like action verbs) but was actually just wrong in the context or distracting because it was trying too hard. I felt like the author more often told us what was happening than showed us, creating a distance between the reader and the work. The book also started with a rather large information dump, and that is one of my big pet peeves about novels, and it seems to be particularly rampant in indie-published works. It needed firm-handed editors–developmental, line, and copy editors. The book did have issues with grammar, punctuation, and usage that were hard to overlook. But, at least, the recipes do look good.