We’ve had some lovely spring weather this week and, this lunchtime, I decided to take a stroll over to the University parks. The ground is still a bit damp at this time of year but sitting on my coat solved that, allowing me to enjoy my meal, a bit of sketching and also some reading.

The book I’m currently in is The Healers by Ann Cleeves. It’s one of her earlier works, first published in 1995 before she’d started the Vera Stanhope (1999) and Jimmy Perez (2006) series that I’ve followed quite closely.

However, I’m pretty sure I spotted a typo on p. 37 of the 2014 Bello edition (second sentence of the fourth paragraph of chapter 6):

To the south of the house the land fell away to low fields and a bum

I’m pretty sure that should have been ‘burn’, a large stream or small river. My guess is that the original might have been handwritten, it was typed up by someone else and no-one spotted that ‘m’ is different from ‘rn’. I’m a few chapters further on, nothing else has jumped out at me and the book as a whole remains an enjoyable detective novel but it was interesting to speculate on how this bum note could have slipped through the copy editing process.