Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I first read 'Crocodile on the Sandbank' when I was twelve, and I've read it, and every other Amelia Peabody book available, at least once a year since then (26 years.) I've also read everything else Barbara Mertz wrote, under her own name as well as under Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels. While I don't love all those books, I do love most of them. I couldn't finish this book. It's not only that Amelia isn't Amelia anymore. That would be enough - she, and everyone else, are like cardboard cutouts of themselves - they might superficially resemble the characters I've grown up with, but their personalities are lacking and their souls are entirely missing. This Amelia ASKS for protection. This Emerson snaps instead of shouting. This Ramses is a boring English gentleman and this Nefret is a boring young woman who happens to have made a poor marital decision. It's as though they'd died and been reanimated, only some bits were missing, so someond stitched on plastic imitations instead. Amelia has a fake wit, Emerson a fake temper...they should have been left peacefully in their graves. Ms. Mertz is probdy turning somersaults in hers. I probably wouldn't have enjoyed the book anyway, given that the characters I love aren't in it; only their doppelgängers. The reason I couldn't finish it, though, is the writing itself. I could tell within three words when a section of Ms. Mertz's writing began, because the contrast was terribly stark. I know Ms. Hess is a friend of Barbara Mertz's, and I've never read any of her books, so I don't want to malign her, but, in this book, her writing - the actual words and sentence structure - just doesn't measure up to Ms. Mertz's remarkable prose. Ms. Mertz's vocabulary and syntax were sublimely perfect, almost all the time. Admittedly poor writing is one of my pet peeves, but I put up with passive voice, questionable slang, and improper use of "me" and "I" in many, many books, because they are isolated faults in an otherwise well-written manuscript. Ms. Mertz's books have always been beautifully written, because she was intelligent, well-read, and exacting. Her writing raises her above the crowd even more than her characters and stories do. In this book, the writing is just awful. I am flabbergasted by the positive reviews - I can only conclude that most people absorb the story without actually noticing the words involved. Again, I'm not saying Ms. Hess can't write - she was on unfamiliar territory, so to speak, which may have impacted her usual abilities. But the parts of this book not written by Ms. Mertz are simplistic, mass market, lowest common denominator stuff; the kind of thing Jacqueline Kirby parodies in her romances, (if you don't know Jacqueline Kirby, you should.) It was poorly organized, too - I got around 1/3 of the way through, and I really couldn't tell you what was going on. It read like a series of random encounters between generic characters - characters, not people. I would never have purchased this book if I'd read a sample of the first chapter, and it was actually painful to read in this context, against the background of the whole series. I was almost in tears by the time I gave up. Arguably, no one else could have done justice to Amelia Peabody - she is a truly remarkable character, even amongst Ms. Mertz's heroines. I think trying was a mistake - I would rather the book had remained unpublished.