I suppose the book suffered by comparison with all the great novels I’ve been reading lately. MacDonald, Kaminsky, Kellerman, Hurwitz. Books from authors who know how to hook me and reel me in, feeding my addiction like a pusher. I’ve been going through some personal drama recently, and I discovered that, for all its vaunted capacity to zombify us, the internet failed to provide me the genuine distraction I required. Only the ancient, beloved magic of a really good book could make me lose myself and forget idle care for a while.

So I saw a mystery being offered free in a promotional deal. Looked interesting, and I had nothing to lose downloading it.

And I really started rooting for this author. Unlike so many new authors I see these days, he actually knew how to spell. His usage was correct. His grammar was right. I greatly wanted this guy to succeed.

I held out through about 40% of the book. I really gave him a chance.

But he bored me.

The plot was promising – the reliable old trope of a man falsely accused of murder, hiding from the law, trying to discover the true culprit. There was plenty of potential for peril.

But I didn’t feel the danger as the story was being told. And I thought the hero was acting like an idiot. I just couldn’t care much after a while.

I hope the author gets it together. He can write a sentence. All he needs is to learn plotting.

Plotting. That’s one of those topics where, as the preachers say, I point a finger at someone else and find my four other fingers pointing back at me.

I don’t consider myself a very good plotter myself.

Maybe it’s soft-heartedness. I posted on Facebook a while back that “The true villain of every story is the author.” Plotting comes down to torturing your characters. Every bad thing that happens to them was thought up by you. Giving them a break is bad for the story, a betrayal of the reader.

Or maybe there’s something else I haven’t learned yet. Some holy grail of plotting still hovering outside my ken.