Well.
So, I was looking for something new to read, and I stumbled across these novelizations of the Death in Paradise show. Which, I confess, is a guilty pleasure of mine, even though it's....well.
Now, the reviews are excellent, really; over 2700 reviews and ratings, nearly 5 stars (4.3, apparently).
I did not expect that:
- It's literally a retelling of one of the show's shows--the one about the Spa guru who gets stabbed in a meditation hut with 5 other people; and,
- that the WRITING wouldn't be nearly as good as the show's (!!!) (even though apparently, these books are by the person who originally wrote the scripts and developed DIP!);
- that I would have absolutely no...connection to the characters, and in fact, they're largely unlikeable. Dwayne is a cardboard cutout, as is the other fellow, Fidel, whom I think gets about 2 lines in the entire thing), and
- some genius at "Canelo USA" (publisher) decided to forcibly LEFT-align the enitre book. Other than disassembling the book, taking it apart and recoding it, there's nothing I can do to force it to do anything else. Suffice to say, I'm pissed about it. I HATE left-aligned text on my damn Kindle. At my shop, we don't justify them; we don't align them (other than things like block quotes, etc., of course!). That way, everybody can roll their own, on their own devices. I HATE IT when left-alignment is forced on me.
- Grrrrr.
Anyway, what a bummer. Purportedly, the second book in the series is "better" with a gripping plot and all that, but given how far astray the reviews for the first one led me, I'm not sure I want to risk the time to find out. It's not the money, although that counts too--but dammit. It's clear that the author leaned heavily on the extant characterizations of the participants (Richard Poole and all those folks) to fill in the players rather than
putting them on the page.
(This
is the reading V&R thread, is it not? Or have I taken a wrong turn somewhere along the turnpike?)
Hitch