The Flip

With three typos on the book jacket alone, I didn’t expect much from The Flip by Michael Phillip Cash. The novel is about a married couple who “flip” houses. They buy cheap houses, fix them up, and sell them for profit. Their current project, Hemmings House, is bigger and older than their usual buys and also holds an ominous secret that takes its toll on the couple’s marriage.

What this book needs is a good copyeditor. The awkward formatting and plethora of typos distract from the story. It is filled with formatting errors (some pages only have one line of text in the middle of the page), punctuation errors, and grammatical errors. While I hate to judge the story itself based on errors such as these, it is hard to separate the two. These errors made the book far less enjoyable than it could have been.

The Flip has potential, however. The story itself is intriguing, the characters are vivid, and the amount of research Cash has done on house flipping is impressive. With a thorough editing job, this book could gain a couple of stars and be a very good read that I would recommend to friends and family.