Whaddya Want, Perfection?

So there I was last night, lying in bed and reading my copy of British author-psychologist Frank Tallis’ third Max Lieberman historical mystery, Fatal Lies. When suddenly I reached page 154 ... and found that the next page was 123 again. Huh? I flipped ahead, thinking that the publisher, Century, might simply have inserted an extra signature into this copy and that if I just got past that, the story would pick up again on page 155. But no, the pages between 154 and 187 were missing, with a duplicate set (123-154) stuck in the middle.

This sort of thing hasn’t often happened to me. In fact, I can remember only one previous instance. My hardback copy of Oath of Fealty, a 1981 science-fiction novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, had some repeated pages inserted near the end--but at least there were none missing.

Drat! Now I have to send Fatal Lies back to Amazon UK and hope to receive a pristine replacement copy. I hope one arrives soon, as I was really enjoying Tallis’ tale of dire doings at a Vienna military school in 1903.