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4.5
“Mystery Man” was originally published in 1997 as part of the Silhouette Romance imprint. It’s a light and fluffy romance with entertaining banter between our brooding hero and spunky heroine, a couple of adorable kids, a dash of comedy, a bit of mystery, kidnappings, and a car chase. It was an entertaining and quick read for a lazy afternoon, and it holds up well even though it’s dated. I enjoyed this story, except for one annoying incident. SPOILER ALERT. Near the end of the book, our hero, who has already declared his love for our heroine and asked her to marry him, decides that there’s one more hoop for her to jump through. A man of his experience should have known that his decision would cause deep emotional distress to the woman he loved. And when he finally comes back around after a lengthy period with no contact, not even a phone call, our heroine forgives all without even a hesitation. I’d have smacked him upside the head with the nearest blunt object, or at least told him off and made him grovel a little for causing such hurt. Frankly, I don’t like that he seemed oblivious to her feelings, and she behaved like a doormat at the end, when she showed plenty of spirit throughout the rest of the book. Still, it was a good read, and I would recommend it. I especially enjoyed the final revelation of the results of the special project the kids were working on.EDITING ISSUES: The spelling and grammar for all English words was excellent, with no typos or OCR errors. However, whoever copy edited the English didn’t bother to check the Spanish. I do not speak Spanish, and yet, even I realized that words were being misspelled. I counted 40 Spanish spelling errors (and 1 German spelling error). And most of the errors were, in my opinion, inexcusable, as they were place names, people’s names, or common words. For example, the city of Cancún was misspelled in every one of 18 mentions as Cancñaun. The site of Chichén Itzá was misspelled every time as Chichñaen Itzñaa. Also Señor was consistently misspelled as Señtnor. And common names like José, Diáz, Cortés, as well as common words like policía and inglés were misspelled. Also the German word doppelgänger was misspelled as doppelgñuanger. I checked, and none of these errors were present in the original print edition. In addition, the print edition contained 30 scene breaks that were not present in the Kindle edition. Other than that, the book was very readable. Now some people might think I’m being too picky. But I find it an extreme annoyance to buy an ebook with my hard-earned money from a major publishing house with, no doubt, scores of copy editors on site, only to find that they didn’t bother to give the digital edition the same care as they give a print edition. It’s shameless and it’s a cheat, and the publishing house shouldn’t be rewarded for shoddy workmanship. I believe the ebook reading community needs to hold them accountable.
