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A review by bunrab
The Beast by Faye Kellerman
2.0
I don't know whether this one is a substitute writer, or a serious editing failure, but it's quite bad. Punctuation errors and word misusage (affective instead of effective, for example) are obvious, but the bad writing is the real sin. The dialogue is pretty unbelievable in many places, too - since when would a teenager refer to himself as a "dreadful actor"? He'd use 'awful' or 'terrible' but I don't think teenagers have used 'dreadful' in that sense anytime this past 70 years or so.
And 'manikin'? And 'plum nuts' instead of 'plumb'? Didn't anybody copy edit this at ALL?
The bad writing. Some egregious examples:
"'He told me his father's brothels patronized all sorts of men.'" Um, I suspect the men patronized the brothels, not the other way around.
And "The web site for the Cervical Dystonia Center was founded twenty-five years ago by Baroness Graciela Johannesbourgh.' I suspect this one should be that the web site /says/ that the /Center/ was founded twenty-five years ago. We didn't have a web 25 years ago, we had an internet with bulletin boards and email and forums and a few specialized portals, but we didn't have a web and web sites - HTML and things like URLs were invented in 1990, and even once we did have the web, I doubt the founder of the center created her own web site...
And the list of snakes, done in a random odd font, bold and enlarged, totally unnecessarily. And the gratuitous call to Dr. Delaware, Kellerman's husband's series character - not only unnecessary, but unbelievable, since it's a question not even faintly in his area of expertise, and the answers he gives are in totally unprofessional terms.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
And 'manikin'? And 'plum nuts' instead of 'plumb'? Didn't anybody copy edit this at ALL?
The bad writing. Some egregious examples:
"'He told me his father's brothels patronized all sorts of men.'" Um, I suspect the men patronized the brothels, not the other way around.
And "The web site for the Cervical Dystonia Center was founded twenty-five years ago by Baroness Graciela Johannesbourgh.' I suspect this one should be that the web site /says/ that the /Center/ was founded twenty-five years ago. We didn't have a web 25 years ago, we had an internet with bulletin boards and email and forums and a few specialized portals, but we didn't have a web and web sites - HTML and things like URLs were invented in 1990, and even once we did have the web, I doubt the founder of the center created her own web site...
And the list of snakes, done in a random odd font, bold and enlarged, totally unnecessarily. And the gratuitous call to Dr. Delaware, Kellerman's husband's series character - not only unnecessary, but unbelievable, since it's a question not even faintly in his area of expertise, and the answers he gives are in totally unprofessional terms.
I could go on, but you get the idea.