The welcome two-day rain has made the garden impassible, so I'll sneak in a book review.
Saints & Sinners Ball by Stacy M Jones
I finished this book because I kind of liked the supernatural element and wanted to see where it ended up. It wasn't worth the effort.
The author appeared to have gone through her manuscript and replaced almost all of the perfectly innocuous (and invisible) "he said/she said" constructs with catchy action verbs. Annoying and intrusive, catchy action verbs. And in the "he said/she said" constructs that remained, she added adverbs. Ick.
Here's an example of some:
..., Harper whined.
......Harper said ruefully...
...Jackson offered...
...Harper said sarcastically...
...Jackson laughed...
Hattie jumped in. "...
...Hattie directed.
...Harper grumbled.
...Hattie informed her.
...Harper asked confused.
After I started noticing this, it bugged me to the point of distraction. Later in the book I stopped noticing, but I was skimming the words at that point and probably bleeping over most of them.
The other thing that was really annoying was her persistent use of the abbreviations for "detective" and some other word that was probably "Friar" but I have no idea, really. She started off calling Detective Granger simply "Granger", and that seemed fine. But at some point she persistently switched to "Det. Granger" and every single time I read it, I had to pause and remember what that stood for. And the use of "Fr." in front of the priest's name was completely ridiculous. Who uses that sort of thing in normal discourse?
Sorry to be so picky, but it made this very hard to read. And the ending didn't make me happy, either.
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