Avoiding Matthew by Caroline Bell Foster

Story Overwhelmed by Technical Errors

I typically enjoy romantic suspense or suspenseful romance, whichever way the plot tends to skew. I was looking forward to this one, as the blurb suggested it had a globe-hopping thriller element as well. Unfortunately, the book had so many technical errors that I found myself overly distracted and could not enjoy the story.

What kind of technical errors? The author doesn’t seem to have a clear grasp of grammar, punctuation, and usage to such an extent that barely a paragraph goes by without some sort of error. Clearly, this was not professionally copyedited or proofread. Commas were sometimes missing altogether or used when they should not have been. Sometimes I had to reread a line because the lack of punctuation (or wrong punctuation) made it confusing. At least one sentence ended with a comma instead of a period. There was a lot of headhopping in this book; the narrator did not always stay consistent for a particular scene or segment of a chapter. The author quite often confused person and tense in the areas where she had a character think or muse about a specific idea. In one instance in two paragraphs right next to each other, she had a character “muse” in the second person and then “think” in the first person! Same character, same train of thought.

The two characters have a sexual history, and the book does get sexual very fast. Their lust for each other frequently overwhelms the rest of the story. The author does use some profanity and crude words, which I’m not a fan of. At times, it felt like the characters were just toying with each other, and that started to grate on my nerves.