I was unnaturally exhausted after the metal fest, but I realised why yesterday: I was coming down with some virus or other. So I had to pick some book appropriate to read while having a fever, and I picked an Elizabeth Peters — she writes books that are easy on the brain.
Cracking open this book, it just looks very strange. I mean, the margins are unusually wide for a text that’s that compact… and it’s a bit blurry? And then I realised: This must be a print-on-demand book! That’s printed from a scan of a paperback, but not printed the same size. And after flipping to the last page, that turned out to be true: It’s printed by Lightning Source, a print-on-demand firm. Mystery solved!
If I’d known, I’d have bought a used copy instead. Butl this is a pretty nice print-on-demand book — it doesn’t have that icky soft-touch phthalate coating that many of them use to mysteriously “class things up”, but achieve the opposite effect. And I quite prefer a facsimile version (even with the slightly blurred text) over a cheaply OCR’d and barely proof-read one — those things can be truly horrible.
Oh, what’s the, like text like? It’s pretty good. Peters writes in an amusing way, and she’s good with characters, but she often gets lost in the weeds when it comes to the actual mystery and the plot. You can just tell how she struggled to manage to get to the end of this one — it’s 360 pages, and that’s mostly because she’s set up so many complications that she has to work through, and halfway through she starts to get a bit desperate. At least that’s how I read it.
Which led to me not only guessing who the red herring was, but also what the solution was way ahead of time, and that’s not fun. And I still have a fever! If somebody feverish manages to figure out the mystery, you were struggling while writing it.
But it’s perfectly entertaining nonetheless.
Naked Once More (1989) by Elizabeth Peters (buy new, buy used, 3.91 on Goodreads)