If you’re a frequent flyer reader here then you know that there are occasions when I read a book so dreadful that it becomes a teaching moment. Notes are made. I use the awfulness as an example (of what not to do) for my crime writing class.
Who can forget the honey-haired denim-eyed fiasco?
This isn’t going to top that (or is it?).

I’m reading a boxed set on my Kindle.
It’s apparently written by a husband and wife team. It sure as hell never met an editor.
Right from the first page I realised the writer/s didn’t know what a mess they were making within the pages of this “crime” story.
Let me share the mess with you.
Every cup, be it tea or coffee or water, is laid on tables.
Now while it’s true that “you lie down, and you lay something down” … if you lay a cup down it’s going to spill everywhere.
Word choices matter.
You can put it down, you can set it down, you can even place the cup on a coaster. But if you lay it down you may as well knock it over.
And if you do this all through a book (at every opportunity) you’ve got quite the sticky mess, haven’t you?
The other thing these writers seem to enjoy is climbing on and off chairs.
Yep, I see ‘climb on a chair’ and think they stood on it to reach something.
My brain shows me images of the character standing on something when I see climb in relation to a chair or a bed. What do you see?
Therefore, there were short people who couldn’t reach the cup lying in the table without climbing. Maybe they should slurp spilled coffee from the table edge?
Big question: How did they drive?
They climbed in a lot of cars too, which is fine a few times but how did they drive if they were so short they couldn’t reach a cup on a table?
Clearly there is more wrong with the stories than what I’ve mentioned.
But, I’m still reading. Why?
Because I can’t be bothered choosing another book to read. Sheer laziness. But in saying that, today might be the day, I am now up to book 3 and I can’t see me finishing it because it’s the worst yet. No one’s wiped the sticky tables and desks down. The short people are still climbing on chairs. They brew everything. There is no making a coffee. It’s always brewed even when it’s instant coffee. It’s as if they have some favourite words and no one has said, “Hey you need less brews, stop laying cups down, and for God’s sake sit on a fucking chair.”
Book three is so far has way too much recapping of the last two atrocities books in the series.
FYI: The main characters aren’t endearing at all. Two are annoying and selfish, the other is an idiot who lets the first two run roughshod over him yet he was recently a much decorated Detective Inspector with Police.

Authors have favourite words while we’re writing. We do. But, we also hope that if we don’t notice how many times we’ve used a particular word, our editor/s will. I know my editor would ring me and ask what the hell I was thinking if I laid cups on tables and climbed on every chair I came across.

If you’re feeling that you need a good read, then go buy the first of my Byte Series: