Difficult to write reviews?

Friday Felicitations!

I can't believe it's back to Friday again but it's certainly not been a boring week. I'm not going all
political but certain things have dominated my week and stolen some time from my new writing. I've caught up as much as I've wanted with politics both Scottish and from the US, and I've battled a cold and dabbed the noses of grandchildren.

Now my priority is preparing to go to 2 Christmas Craft Fair venues, one very local in my village with around 30 crafters attending on Friday 11th Nov. and the other a very large one at the Hilton Treetops Hotel, Aberdeen, which will have around 100 crafters on Sat. 12th Nov.

The book boxes are ready and the rest of my table organised. Meanwhile, I've got a little more of my Hadrian's Wall course done. The first week of study is 20 'units' and I've, so far, covered 11 of them. I reckon I'll be catching up this Sunday.

However, this post title is about reviews. I've just finished a novel that's been sitting in my kindle queue for quite a while, mainly because I read the beginning chapter some time ago and found the editing, punctuation and formatting really poor. It was abandoned but this last couple of weeks I opened it up again since the subject matter of the novel was one of interest.

If I'd not been intrigued by the storyline, set in Edinburgh in 1745, I wouldn't have persevered. 1745 was a famously historical year in Scotland, it being the date of the final Jacobite uprising, the intention to restore Bonnie Prince Charlie  (Charles Edward Stuart) to the throne. The story actually has little to do with the Jacobites and more to do with investigative 'police' detection of murderers at a time when there was no actual police force as we recognise the service today. In 1745 Edinburgh, law and order, of sorts, was maintained by the Town Guard.

A Pound of Flesh by Stuart S. Laing is an interesting story - the only reason I persevered with it since lack of proper punctuation and poor formatting tends to put me off reading. Very good historical detail is intermingled with some very modern concepts of sleuthing, but I found the mix a good balance and any anachronisms seemed to balance out. There's good characterisation which matches well with good vocabulary, so long as the reader is prepared to do the work of punctuating it along the way.

I notice that 'A Pound of Flesh' is the first of the series which now runs to about 8 books. If I buy another of the series, which for the storyline I may do, but I certainly would hope that there has been a thorough editing and formatting process done to it.

N.B. And since adding the book cover image to this post has reorganised the formatting on this page in a way that I can't seem to change, maybe the image above of the book cover has an issue as well.

Slàinthe!