The most recent novel from J.D. Robb, Promises in Death, opens with a murder that strikes close to home: the victim is Amaryllis Coltraine, a cop and the lover of Chief Medical Examiner Morris.
Despite the more personal nature of this case, this book fell somewhat flat for me. It may just have been that, reading it at three in the morning as I did, I couldn’t suspend disbelief enough: I couldn’t pretend that there was a chance that Morris wouldn’t get justice and start healing, and so there wasn’t very much suspense. I realize that this could be said about basically every entry in the series, so it was probably me, not the book.
(Though it didn’t help that the charming quirks of Morris’s personality get suppressed by his role as the grieving loved one.)
Also, apparently this book was not copy-edited, otherwise a sentence like “Art radiated from the walls in an eclectic mix from bold, bright colors and odd shapes to elegant pencil drawings of naked women in various stages of undress” would never have been published.
Are there more sentences like that one? Doesn’t look like my usual fare, but if that’s representative then it could be entertaining reading…
tikitu, alas (?), I didn’t spot any.
Sadly, this is an all-too-frequent occurrence in Roberts’s books, from what I’ve seen. I can’t count the number of homophone errors I’ve found in both the “in Death” books and the ones published in her own name. I might be wrong, but it seems like it’s happened as she’s acquired more fame; it’s almost like the publishers have concluded “It’s Nora; she wouldn’t make dumb mistakes like that, so there’s no need for copyediting.”
Or maybe they’ve just laid off all those folks.
Linkmeister, my guess is that they’ve got her on a really short production schedule. Though considering how prolific the woman is, you’d think they could manage to build in more time.
You might be right. I found another example at the end of Chapter Two (I read it yesterday):
Amateur and souvenir are not even homophone errors; an automated spell-checker would have caught them.
I grumbled about it over at my place.
Wow, yeah, those are bad. I read these fast so I go right by them.
(And I fixed the formatting issue–it wasn’t all your fault, fwiw.)