Wicked Truth (March Madness)

The story starts interesting. A woman with a bad reputation coming from nowhere believed only by her friend and people who believe the gossips are meddling. She is a rightful woman and wants to be believed. Suddenly she falls in love with her friend's uncle (I really don't know where the love comes from, once he takes her for a loose woman and mistreats her) and "embrace" her bad reputation, without even trying to find out how those kinds of things about her were spread. The story is shallow and the protagonists are children who are driven by their passions without thinking about consequences or the other part's opinion. The misterious aspect of the plot is basically put aside by their pathetical relationship. A huge disapointment.

I have been donating my paper books for several years and accidentally donated my copy of The Wicked Truth. When I discovered this, I re-purchased the paper version (and The Arrangement, Lyn Stone's follow-up, which I'd also accidental donated).Then I bought my Kindle and donated even more paper books. I only kept those I knew I would read again, which included The Wicked Truth and The Arrangement. I reread this book recently and had The Arrangement in my car so I could read it again. My mother took it out of the car and started reading it and loved what she read. I advised her to read The Wicked Truth first even though they are standalone books. Neil, Betts and Lindy do appear in the second book.Now Mom has both of them and I thought I would check the Kindle Store to see if they'd been kindleized. Yes! I didn't hesitate. I bought them both right away.I'm seldom this enthusiastic about Harlequin books but these two were wonderful reads with engaging characters. I'll be reading them both again starting this weekend.

I recently discovered Lyn Stone as an author, and enjoy her writing. This book does have interesting characters that are well developed, a bit of mystery to keep the story interesting and just enough "romance".I would give it 5 stars, but the editing, at least on a basic kindle, was so annoying that I can't. There are several spelling errors, tons of bad hyphenations (as though they took a word wrapped document and converted it with the hyphens becoming part of the words), periods were in the middle of sentences, and the authors name appeared in the middle of at least two paragraphs. All of the above happened frequently enough that it interrupted the flow of my reading. It also made me feel that whoever is supposed to check these things, just didn't care about the customer.

The story was pretty thin on character development. Few of the people were given much depth. The typos and odd typeface insertions were among the worst I have encountered. Shame on the publisher for not taking more care.