RARA-AVIS: Ken Bruen's Ammunition

From: DJ-Anonyme@webtv.net
Date: 29 Jul 2007


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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