Review: Skip the US Edition; buy the UK original
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 06 13, 2012
While this is an interesting and compelling crime novel, the "American edition" of this thriller was so frustrating to read (even at the $0.00 price), I gave up about 20% of the way through and paid for theoriginal UK version. This turned out to be $1.99 well spent in terms of orthodontic savings, as the US edition was causing me to grind my teeth.Sugar & Spice is a well-plotted and nicely paced thriller in the original UK setting; the geography, crime procedures and lexicon are seamless, organic elements of the book. In the US edition, the same elements are poorly executed and read as artificial, implausible, and jarring in their new versions. While the book has been physically relocated, it hasn't been linguistically relocated, and the result is deeply discordant. Some examples:When Thomas Bristow is driving to see his sister, he travels "to take lunch" with her, whereas Americans "have lunch." On this journey he notes the "contra flow" of traffic;contraflow is generally restricted to bike lanes in the US and the terms is not in wide US use. Bristow is pulled over by local law enforcement, and the officer asks him "Do you have your documents with you, Mr Bristow?" No US officer would ask for "documents" - the standard is "licence and registration, please" and it's a demand not a request. (In the US you  are required to drive with your license on you; in the UK you actually have 7 days to produce it after being pulled over.)All of the above examples take place within the span of three pages in the book, so you can imagine how dense with issues this version of Sugar & Spice is. As an American ex-pat who lived in London for 10 years before moving to Ireland, I may be more sensitive to these transgressions than the average reader, but I don't think so. They're irritating and distracting, and all the worse because this entire exercise is utterly unnecessary. Buy the UK version if you'd like to read Sugar & Spice.