Review: Don't buy this
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 04 3, 2013
The first book in this series is fine but this is in no way a novella or a short story. Once in the text, it doesn't even pretend to be, with no denouement and the snippet concluding with, to be continued. So the reader is paying for the sort of excerpt usually provided as a free teaser at the end of a previous book in a series. This should have been  clearly articulated.................Since writing the above, I've been amused by the specious and laughable attacks on my views in some of the subsequent reviews and comments. Please explain how the comments above can be seen as "trashing" the author. I make no criticisms of the author's writing. Indeed, I in no way criticised her first book and consider her to be more competent and linguistically accurate than many others in the romance field. She certainly knows how to spell, which is more than can be said of one of her readers who has enthusiastically misinterpreted me.As I have mentioned in the comments, I am a longterm fan of short stories - some of them very brief, others as long as a novella. I own thousands of short stories in print and electronic form and have a thirty year history of reading and re-reading the best of them. The notion that I should expect the shortest of them to be incomplete is nonsensical. I have already mentioned that I expect a short story to stand alone as a separate entity and not to conclude with the phrase "to be continued ....".  I am confident that this is what most other habitual readers of short stories would also anticipate.I have no problems with buying excerpts. I have readily and recently bought anthologies that include favourite excerpts chosen by authors and/or editors. The difference is that they were marketed as excerpts, NOT short stories.Moreover, I acknowledge that authors/publishers/Amazon have a right to begin charging for teasers, or to sell a book chapter by chapter. They just need to warn the reader that this is what is happening.I wish this author well with her new work and might choose to buy it. That is not to say I withdraw my initial comments about how the teaser, or excerpt, was described and marketed.