Because the books were sold to me in rebadged covers in similar shades of brown, and because I was not paying proper attention when I picked it off the shelf, it was not, after all, The Lieutenant, but Dark Places I was reading.
Which is not unlike starting a glass of lemonade only to realise, one mouthful in, it is soda water.
adelaide from adelaide 
…but still better than Bryce Courtenay….
…or Colleen McCulloch.
Well…!
aaaaaaagh. disappointing.
it wasn’t disappointing (actually, I prefer soda water to lemonade) so much as extremely disconcerting
Sometimes a similar thing happens to me when I’m working through two novels at once, most recently a conflation of Huckleberry Finn and Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge.