Croker Diaries: Justice Be Mine

Two stars because somewhere in those 140 pages there were some good story bones. The premise, the set up and even the who, what, where, when were if maybe a little predictable, still decent possible story. The problem is that all that was covered up with tedious, banal, unnecessary details and comments and plenty of grammatical issues. There were parts felt like they were written for a law school text book. I read my fair share of legal thrillers. I don't need legal terms explained to me ad nauseum (if there's something I'm curious about, that's what google is for). I don't need to be told the time down to the second. Say your character arrived at the coffee shop the next morning. Want to be more descriptive? Use early or late. Say it was during the usual morning crush. I don't give a damn if it was 8:35 am on Tuesday, July 12, 2014. There wasn't a bomb set to explode at that second; there was no importance to that day. I also don't need to know what a character ordered for lunch - every time he orders lunch. Is that lunch order important to the story? Does it affect something that happens down the line? Like say the character gets food poisoning or causes an epiphany that the protagonist was allergic to nuts and that's why whatever happened, happened? No? Then it's not needed. And the receptionist commenting to herself about said lunch orders is even more extraneous.

Poor sentence structure at times stuck out like a sore thumb. Simple, stilted dialog (no one talks like that on the phone). Not so great ebook formatting. And, if as the author, you're going to knock a big ol' hole in the 4th wall, then tear the whole thing down. Don't try to board up that hole and go back to how things were. Don't use phrases that make it sound like your third person narrator just tapped the reader on the shoulder and is directly talking him/her and then pretend you didn't do that. It takes the reader right out of the story. This is a good example of why self publishing authors need a good editor or at least someone who will read drafts objectively and offer constructive criticism. Oh and remember - read what you write. That absolute favorite part? Dump it. Trash it. Get rid of it. Because mostly likely it doesn't fit with everything else.