This review is not about the quality of the book, which I bought for my husband and he was reading with considerable interest - until he suddenly ran smack dab into a giant blank in the story.
The PROBLEM is that he suddenly got "short-sheeted" so to speak by a book that doesn't pass the publisher double-check-the-editing (or galleys or something) test: On page 635, in Act 3 Chapter 10, the chapter has no ending. The bottom of page 635 is mid-sentence and the very next page - page 636 is already the next (?) "chapter" which is a whole new Act not called Act 4 but rather "Curtain." Who knows how many pages got left out at the end of Act 3 Chapter 10, but at least one page got left out. The page numbering was also wrong on the galleys or whatever because there is no missing page NUMBER - it goes from 635 to 636. But there is no end to the chapter - just swallowed up. The book is missing the equivalent of pages 635b and possibly 635c, 635d, etc...
As further evidence of just how many pages might be missing, your site says the book has 672 pages. The copy we got only has 662. (And there's no blank back page or anything - very odd to have a book's last page of story be facing the back cover. Clearly, a lot is wrong in this printing - and apparently about 10 pages of the story are missing -- and of all places, the 10 or so pages just before the final "Curtain"!
We of course didn't know that he had to start reading it the minute I gave it to him in order to discover this problem while the book was still in Amazon's returnable time window - as being defective.
Grrr. Help.
3/20/12 update: Well, an amazon worker responded to the above review by emailing me the same day to apologize and say they were sending a replacement book by 2-day mail the next day (yesterday), something I hadn't even asked for, and I was impressed - but also wary. I wrote her back saying "I assume this means you will have someone check to make sure the replacement book doesn't have the same problem as the first one?" and she wrote back (quoting her exactly "I would like to assure you that the replacement order for the book "Carter Beats the Devil" will be having all its pages. I'm very sorry about all of this. I hope you'll consider this an isolated incident and give us another chance in the future."
Can you guess where this is heading? The replacement book arrived today - meaning it took only ONE day to get here - but to what avail? Second book, same as the first. NOBODY tells a stock person after a review like this to check the stock and see if they've got a problem with a batch of books. This was clear to me that it was not an isolated case, the amazon worker was insistent that the new book would be perfect. All this wasted shipping expense on their part because somebody couldn't instead just check their stock for defective copies??! And now i have TWO bad copies of Carter Beats the Devil to send back! And try to find a complete one ... GRRRRRR. HELP.
4/27/12 final update: After getting 3 - that's THREE - flawed copies from amazon (each time a live phone respondent or emailer assuring me I was going to get a perfect copy with no text missing but instead each copy was yet another incomplete text), I finally gave up on amazon and contacted the publisher Hyperion (reaching them was no piece of cake either). THEY sent me a copy which is complete. And it turns out that amazon is wrong in saying the book has 672 pages - It is only supposed to have 662 pages, so what was missing in the flawed copies turns out to be the rest of one sentence, not multiple pages, but the information provided by amazon forced a tentative conclusion that as many as 10 pages might have been missing.
So, for those of you who get the version amazon has been sending out that ends mid-sentence on pg. 635, here is the rest of the sentence: "...that when you had lived enough of your life, there was no difference between the two." This completes the sentence that begins "And now, the very moment he stood, pulling Phoebe up with him, he felt-" ...
Why amazon couldn't have had its own staff see this and contact the publisher like I wound up having to do is beyond me. Amazon gets lousy marks on how they handled this - very cavalierly.
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