The Dead of Winter by Rennie Airth
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
OK, it’s rare for me not to finish a book. I’m endemically inclined to finish any book I pick up, even if it takes me years. But this writer has a really annoying habit of jumping around in time. At first, I thought the publisher had screwed up the ebook formatting and left out pages. I’d be in the middle of a scene, “turn” the page, and I’m suddenly somewhere ahead in time. When I kept reading, I’d eventually enter one of the character’s thoughts of what happened from the point the writer left off. I felt like I was getting mental whiplash every few pages.
That was bad enough. But the editor did a piss poor job with quotation marks. I’d be reading dialogue, enter another bunch of thoughts (or even a simple “he said”) as indicated by a close quotation mark, then suddenly realise I was reading dialogue — except the editor forgot to put in the open quotation mark to indicate the character had started speaking again, necessitating me to go back and reread it.
The mystery itself is interesting. But when the physical act of reading is this difficult, it’s not worth pursuing. Thank goodness I borrowed this from the Toronto Public Library and didn’t buy it.
