Words in Review: Picture Perfect Murder and Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder, and then what happened

Full disclosure:  I obtained a Kindle copy of Picture Perfect Murder by Jenna St. James when it was offered free on Amazon.  I borrowed a Kindle copy of Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder by Joanne Fluke via Amazon Prime.  I do not know the authors nor have I ever communicated with them in any way about their books or any other subject.  I am a traditionally published author of historical romances, and self-published in contemporary romantic suspense and miscellaneous non-fiction.

Further disclosure:  I read both books in their entirety.

Review of "page 1" is here.

Openings are important.  If the opening of your book fails to hook the reader, you aren't going to be there to urge her to take a second look, read a few more pages, give the story a chance to develop.  The sooner you grab her interest, the less chance you have that she'll give up. Remember, there are hundreds of other books out there for her too choose from.  You can't count on her being one of those readers who reads everything and loves it; she might be, or she might not.

If, however, she does continue to read, you now have to continue the story.  All the rest of it is the ". . .and then what happened" part of the book.  At any point in that ". . .and then what happened," your reader still has the opportunity to give up, quit, toss it aside, DNF* and WNRTAA**.

(*DNF = Did Not Finish; **WNRTAA = Will Never Read This Author Again.)

Readers come to your book with expectations, and this is especially true for genre fiction.  The two books currently under discussion are categorized as "cozy mysteries," which means they are expected to follow certain conventions.  These include, but are not limited to:

1. Generally a small-town or rural setting.

2. Murder but not too gruesome, and generally not committed on the page.

3.  Amateur sleuth who has informal connections to law enforcement but is dismissed by them, until of course she gets lucky and solves the crime for them.

Both Picture Perfect Murder and Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder take place in small towns.  In the former, Ryli Sinclair tells us on page 1 that she lives in "my small hometown of Granville, Missouri."  She works for the local newspaper, so we learn right away that she qualifies as an amateur sleuth.  Hannah Swenson operates a cookie bakery and coffee shop called The Cookie Jar in her hometown of Lake Eden, Minnesota.  

Picture Perfect Murder opens with Sinclair called in to take photographs of a murder victim.  

 This dead body was spread out over the kitchen table, naked from the waist up, covered in blood, and missing a heart.

St. James, Jenna. Picture Perfect Murder (A Ryli Sinclair Mystery Book 1) (Kindle Locations 57-58). Kindle Edition. 

Because this is on page 1, it kind of breaks the rules/conventions/guidelines of the cozy mystery genre regarding the gruesomeness of the murder.

Hannah Swenson, on the other hand, doesn't even discover the murder victim until page 23 (of 289), at the very end of Chapter One.  All the preceding pages are devoted to background information about Hannah, why she's come back to Eden Lake (from somewhere else), about her family, about her cat, about her bakery, about every detail of her morning from six o'clock to approximately half past eight, when she finds the deceased.

Ryli, on the other hand, did not herself discover the body, but has been called by the police to take photographs.  After the announcement on page 1 of the murder, she (in first person viewpoint narrative) proceeds to dump a bunch of background information, primarily about herself and about the chief of police, who is on the scene as well.

Both books suffer from the same problem: The author fails to integrate background information with action.  Ryli is there in the kitchen -- whose kitchen? -- with various police officers and a mutilated corpse, but she stops the action to give some of her own history, the chief's history, her sexual attraction to him, and so on.

Is any of this background information, as presented in both books, absolutely necessary?  Maybe some of it is, or will be, but almost none of it is necessary at this point.

The key to keeping your reader reading is to mix necessary background information with action and/or dialogue.

The writing of a novel involves three distinct skill sets, two of which you may even remember from high school.  A hundred million years ago when I was in high school, those skill sets were labeled "Form" and "Content," and every paper we turned in was graded separately on each aspect.  "Form" was the writing technique skill set: the grammar and spelling stuff.  "Content" was the meat of the paper.

In writing a novel, "Form" is still the grammar and spelling, the punctuation and proofreading.  "Content" becomes the plot and story construction.  But then there's "Style," something our high school teachers didn't bother too much with.

A novelist's style consists of how she tells the story.  Does she stop the action to give fashion show descriptions of each character's wearing apparel?  Is she able to give each character a distinct voice and personality?  Are the characters' actions and interactions rational and justified?  Does the whole book have an internal consistency that allows the reader to believe this story could really have happened?

This can almost be summed up as: Was this book easy to read, hard to put down?

One page leads to another and another.  The flow of words and action is so smooth that there aren't any convenient stopping places.

Both Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder and Picture Perfect Murder had far too many places where the reading became difficult and the books became easy to put down.  I nearly gave up on Picture Perfect Murder several times because there were either stylistic absurdities or internal inconsistencies.

For instance, were Ryli and the chief of police, Garrett Kimble, actually dating?  Did she just have the hots for him but hadn't gone out with him?

I tried staying clear of him when he first came to town… mainly because he makes the spit in my mouth dry up. Whether it’s from sheer terror or sexual frustration, I don’t know, but more and more lately I’ve been thinking of finding out.

St. James, Jenna. Picture Perfect Murder (A Ryli Sinclair Mystery Book 1) (Kindle Locations 81-83). Kindle Edition.

suggests in the first scene that she's not had any social interaction with him.

Just a few pages later, when Ryli is snooping (!) in Kimble's office, he comes in and we get this:

I was almost nose-to-chest with him.

He reached out and lifted a curl from my shoulder, winding it around his finger. “Leave the investigating to me.”

St. James, Jenna. Picture Perfect Murder (A Ryli Sinclair Mystery Book 1) (Kindle Locations 282-284). Kindle Edition.

Later, Ryli and Kimble have been invited to dinner at her brother Matt's house, and she is arranging to leave work early to get ready for this "date." The following conversation takes place among Ryli, the owner of the newspaper she works for, and the owner's wife:

“What’s going on?” Mindy asked.

I didn’t know if I should tell her. After all, she’s my friend, but she’s also my boss’s wife. What do I say? That I’m going home to shave my legs because I may or may not fool around tonight.

“I’m going to Matt’s tonight for dinner,” I said. “I wanted to stop by the store so I can bake a dessert.”

Hank snorted. “One death this week isn’t enough?”

“Bite me,” I said.

Mindy laughed. “Hank! Be nice. So just the three of you?”

I stared at her. How does she do that? Like she knows I’m hiding something. “No. Garrett is picking me up. We’re going together.”

Mindy squealed. “You know what this means, right?”

“It means she’s probably gonna go and get herself knocked up,” Hank growled.

St. James, Jenna. Picture Perfect Murder (A Ryli Sinclair Mystery Book 1) (Kindle Locations 587-597). Kindle Edition.

Ryli is the newspaper's only employee, filling the roles of reporter as well as photographer.  Granville is described as a town of some ten thousand population; the paper is a weekly.  Ryli also helps Mindy with the layout of the paper.

So, okay, newspaper owner Hank is a jerk; no real boss in 2015 would be able to get away with that kind of comment to an employee.  But there are other aspects of Ryli's employment at the newspaper that just didn't ring . . . right.

Picture Perfect Murder has a copyright date of 2015.  When I worked for a small town weekly paper in the late 1990s, the staff numbered about 20: six or eight reporters, at least one full-time photographer, two editors, four office staff, five of us in the layout department.  Some layout was still done manually then, but much was already computerized.  There's no way Granville's weekly can be put out with a staff of three.  

Then there's this, as Ryli is finishing her photographing of the opening crime scene:

Half an hour later I finished off my last roll of film. I took plenty of pictures because after my run-in with Kimble, I didn’t want to take any chances of not getting everything possible.

St. James, Jenna. Picture Perfect Murder (A Ryli Sinclair Mystery Book 1) (Kindle Locations 173-175). Kindle Edition.

After Ryli leaves the murder location, she heads to the police station, to which she has a key.

I rifled through my keychain until I came up with the key to get into the station. Claire, the dispatcher for the graveyard shift, should be inside. Running the last few feet to the door, I unlocked it

St. James, Jenna. Picture Perfect Murder (A Ryli Sinclair Mystery Book 1) (Kindle Locations 218-220). Kindle Edition

Why is she at the police station?

“Hey, Claire. It’s me, Ryli. I wanted to drop off the rolls of film for Chief Kimble before I went home.”

St. James, Jenna. Picture Perfect Murder (A Ryli Sinclair Mystery Book 1) (Kindle Location 222). Kindle Edition.

Apparently Ms. St. James doesn't know about digital cameras.  I'm not a professional photographer, but even I have had a digital camera since 2003. 

These are the things that take a reader out of the story.  Most readers won't notice.  Most readers just see the words and turn the pages.

But here's something interesting I found just today.

 

 

This book was published in 2014; over the past seven-plus years, it has garnered over 5000 ratings on Amazon for an average of over 4.5 stars.  On 7 May 2021 (today) the Kindle edition of the book is offered free.

The second book in the series is priced at $4.99.  Though it was released almost seven years ago, it has only 400 ratings for about the same average.

 Looking at the third and fourth books in the series, the number of ratings has continued to decrease.

This doesn't necessarily mean the books aren't selling, but it does suggest that fewer people are reading -- and liking -- the books.

Looking at the 1-star reviews for All Eyes on Me gives the impression it's the form and style that tend to turn people off enough to leave a negative, rather than the content, or story/plot. 

Remember, I'm only one critic.  My word is not the final judgment on your writing.  I may be totally wrong, and your book that breaks all the rules may turn out to be the next million-seller.

The odds, however, are against you.  

As Stephen King has written:

And no matter how much I want to encourage the man or woman trying for the first time to write seriously, I can’t lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry, but there are lots of bad writers.

King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft (p. 141). Scribner. Kindle Edition. 

Words in Review: Picture Perfect Murder and Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder, Page 1

Full disclosure:  I obtained a Kindle copy of Picture Perfect Murder by Jenna St. James when it was offered free on Amazon.  I borrowed a Kindle copy of Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder by Joanne Fluke via Amazon Prime.  I do not know the authors nor have I ever communicated with them in any way about their books or any other subject.  I am a traditionally published author of historical romances, and self-published in contemporary romantic suspense and miscellaneous non-fiction.

Further disclosure:  I read both books in their entirety.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder was originally published by Kensington in 2000 as the first book in the series of cozy mysteries featuring amateur sleuth Hannah Swenson.  The digital edition is dated 2019 but contains no indication as far as having been revised and is also published by Kensington.

Picture Perfect Murder is copyrighted 2015 and published by the author, Jenna St. James.  This is the first book in the Ryli Sinclair cozy mystery series.

Both books have high ratings on Goodreads, as these screenshots from 22 April 2021 show.

 

 

The Fluke book may have negatively benefited from being older and added to Goodreads at the site's beginning, circa 2007, when critical reviews were less likely to be pulled down by thin-skinned authors. The over-all rating for this traditionally published book is only 3.70, where St. James' effort, though published by the author, received 4.24.

It is a sad truth that after September 2013, Goodreads became much less friendly to critical reviewers, especially those who might not have read the whole book or were basing their criticism on something the author had done outside the actual writing of the book.  This action on the part of Goodreads was precipitated by the almost-publication of a book by a young self-publishing author who got some negative reviews even though her book had not been officially published.  Readers flocked to her book to give it five-star ratings -- even though they couldn't have read it because it wasn't published -- in sympathy to the negative reviews she received.  This ultimately evolved into what became known as the Great Purge of 2013, when certain critical reviewers were banned from the platform. . . and critical reviews brought risks to the reviewers.

The message had been sent that Goodreads, as an arm of Amazon, was in the business of selling books, and bad reviews don't sell as many books as good ones.

Setting aside, then, the ratings on Goodreads as potential gauges of writing quality, how do these two books compare?

Picture Perfect Murder is pretty terrible.  Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder isn't a whole lot better.

Of course, that is only my opinion, and I am only one person, one reader, one writer.

Reviews are for readers.  If you've read any of my writing on reviewing, you  know how adamant I am that reviews are not for writers, that writers would do well to never read their reviews and do better to never confront their reviewers.  But writers, especially the self-publishing authors, often claim that they have an interest in those reviews beyond just wanting to know if someone liked or disliked their book.  Whether they feel entitled to it or not, they want those reviews to provide feedback, to help them improve, to tell them what it was that made a reviewer not love their book.

Most readers aren't in a position to do that, and they should never feel obligated to do so.  As I have said often enough, a reader may not even be qualified to render the kind of advice the writer wants.  Sometimes the reader may be entirely wrong in their criticism, whether it's about grammar and punctuation, factual research, story structure, or anything else.  If the writer herself isn't sufficiently knowledgeable, she may take that advice and make what's already correct about her book incorrect.

Writers who want feedback on their work should ideally get that feedback before the book is published, so that the product reaching the reading public is the very best it can be.  For the writer who goes the traditional route, the publisher will presumably fix all the problems since they have a substantial investment in making sure readers don't find problems.

The self-publishing author, however, has only herself to rely on.  If she can afford a professional editor, that may help, but not all those who bill themselves as professional editors really are.  Some of them are no better qualified to edit than the authors themselves.  How is an author to know who to trust?  If the author's own skills aren't top-notch, she may indeed not know.

In a few words, it's a crap shoot.

I can't "fix" every book that falls short.  I can't turn every manuscript into a best-seller.  Nor am I even proposing to try.  But I think what I can do is offer the kind of feedback some writers may be looking for through a detailed analysis of books I personally have found to be seriously lacking in quality.

It's one thing to review a book and say "The characters weren't relatable."  What does that really mean?  That's the kind of question I hope to answer, with specific examples from the books.

In previous posts, I've mentioned some of the reference materials I've relied on in my own writing career.  The ultimate goal of everything is to create a written work in which the written words disappear, leaving the reader immersed in the world of the novel. Though it's not reasonable to expect any novel to be absolutely perfect, every writer should still strive for perfection -- the invisible novel.

The very first step to making your author-published digital novel invisible is to format it correctly. 

If your very first page is divided into block paragraphs -- no indent, extra space between paragraphs -- I as a reader know you don't even know what a book is supposed to look like.  Writers read, and real writers know what real books look like.  That means indented paragraphs; save those extra blank lines to indicate a transition of time or place.

I mention this here because it is the nature of copying and pasting from Kindle pages that they automatically delete all paragraphing, regardless of format.  For ease in reading small snippets, I've put the quoted sections into block paragraphs, but this should never be done in the actual published version of the book.

 

So, how is it that Picture Perfect Murder and Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder fell so far short of perfection? 

Let's start with a look at the very beginning, the opening page of Picture Perfect Murder.

I hate looking at dead bodies. And believe me, I’ve seen a lot of them in my twenty-eight years. There’s nothing that can prepare you for that first glimpse of death.

In college, I worked part time at Jaworski Funeral Home. It was one of those small, family-owned businesses. They were great about working around my class schedule. They were even better about including me as family. A few holiday dinners and family gatherings later, and Ryli Jo Sinclair had become an honorary Jaworski.

For four years I did everything from flower arranging to consoling families. I didn’t deal with the actual prepping of the dead body. But still, a dead body was a dead body as far as I was concerned.

St. James, Jenna. Picture Perfect Murder (A Ryli Sinclair Mystery Book 1) (Kindle Locations 50-56). Kindle Edition. 

So, what's happening?  We're in the viewpoint of a first-person narrator, one Ryli Jo Sinclair, and she's . . . thinking. We don't know where she is or what she's doing or why she's thinking about not liking dead bodies.  Instead of getting right into the action of the story, author St. James indulges in some of Ryli's background.  While this information might become important later on, it's not important now.  There's nothing going on that would make it important.

The mere mention of a dead body in the opening paragraph sets up some anticipation, but the author doesn't follow up on it.  In fact, the next paragraphs provide contradiction to the opening: If Ryli spent four years working for a funeral home, why didn't she get accustomed to dead bodies?

You may be stepping back and saying, "But it's only three paragraphs!"  And that is absolutely correct.  However, if the author is already, in the first three paragraphs of the book, resorting to non-essential character reflection, it doesn't bode well for the rest of the book.  (Spoiler: Holiday dinners with the Jaworski family are never mentioned again.)

Let's look at the opening to Chocolate-Chip Cookie Murder.

Hannah Swensen slipped into the old leather bomber jacket that she’d rescued from the Helping Hands thrift store and reached down to pick up the huge orange tomcat that was rubbing against her ankles. “Okay, Moishe. You can have one refill, but that’s it until tonight.”

As she carried Moishe into the kitchen and set him down by his food bowl, Hannah remembered the day he’d set up camp outside her condo door. He’d looked positively disreputable, covered with matted fur and grime, and she’d immediately taken him in. Who else would adopt a twenty-five-pound, half-blind cat with a torn ear? Hannah had named him Moishe, and though he certainly wouldn’t have won any prizes at the Lake Eden Cat Fanciers’ Club, there had been an instant bond between them.

Fluke, Joanne. Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder (Hannah Swensen series Book 1) (p. 11). Kensington Books. Kindle Edition. 

Because this book is told from a third-person point of view, we aren't quite as directly in Hannah's thoughts, but neither are we out of them.  And just as in Picture Perfect Murder, the opening gives background information that may or may not be important later on.  Hannah is remembering, rather than doing.

If Ryli opens with a reference to a dead body, Hannah opens with nothing.  We don't know what she's doing or where she's going, and there's not the slightest hint of a mystery.

For contrast, let's look at the opening to Martha Grimes' The Man with a Load of Mischief, the first of the Richard Jury mysteries as published in 1981.

Outside the Jack and Hammer, a dog growled.

Inside, his view of the High Street obstructed by the window at his shoulder, Melrose Plant sat in the curve of the bay drinking Old Peculier and reading Rimbaud.

The dog growled deep in its throat and started barking again, something it had been doing intermittently for the last fifteen minutes.

Sun streaming through the cerulean blue and deep green of the tulip-design of the leaded panes threw rainbow colors across his table as Melrose Plant rose up to peer over the reverse letters advertising Hardy’s Crown. The dog sitting in the snow outside the public house was a scruffy Jack Russell belonging to Miss Crisp, who ran the secondhand-furniture shop across the street.

Grimes, Martha (2013-03-26). The Man with a Load of Mischief (Richard Jury Mysteries Book 1) (Kindle Locations 55-60). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

What's different about this opening?  Melrose Plant isn't thinking.  He's doing.  And he's doing something in response to an action over which he has no control, the dog's barking.  He doesn't know what the dog's barking means, but it has aroused his curiosity enough that he has gotten out of his seat and gone to look out the window.

Instead of merely the describing the window as having colored glass in a tulip design, Grimes makes the sun streaming through that glass an active force in the scene.  Though it's not a particularly mysterious or murderous scene, the participants are active, and it's much easier to imagine this scene visually -- cinematographically -- than the opening to either Picture Perfect Murder or Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder.

The reader knows these three books are murder mysteries; they aren't unidentified manuscripts being read cold.  The reader therefore comes to the opening with an expectation that regardless how the book starts, there's going to be at least one murder and someone is going to solve it.  Is it absolutely necessary, you ask, that the murder take place on page 1?  Or that it be referred to on page 1?  

No, it's not.  But what is necessary is that the author begin as she means to go.  If the author resorts to character introspection or retrospection before there's even been any action, does she plan to continue in that manner?

As Shelly Lowenkopf points out in his 1982 article "Creating the Rejection-Resistant Novel," many beginning writers -- and maybe some more experienced ones, too! -- often include in their opening pages "bits and pieces of background and detail the author needs to know in order to back off and let the characters tell the story.  More often than not the reader doesn't care about these bits of trivia and resents being told them."

Yes, the author needs to know how Hannah acquired her cat.  The author needs to know Ryli worked part time for the funeral home.  The reader doesn't need to know this, at least not yet.  Will the reader mind being told the Jaworskis made Ryli feel like a member of the family?  Will the reader resent being told Hannah and her cat had bonded instantly?  Probably not.

However, if that background information is important to the plot, it ought to come out as a result of the plot's unfolding rather than the reader just being handed those details out of the blue.  It's especially annoying in the St. James book because a reader who has been tuned in to the Jaworski story that ends up going nowhere may end up disappointed at not knowing the relevance!

In contrast, the opening to the Grimes book gives the reader a lot of needed information with no introspection.

1.  The dog is growling outside the Jack and Hammer.  Even though we don't yet know exactly what "the Jack and Hammer" is, we know it's the "inside."

2.  Melrose Plant, despite the non-gendered name, is "he."  Even though we may not know what Old Peculier is, we know it's a beverage of some kind because Melrose Plant is drinking it.  We may not know who or what Rimbaud is, but it's somehow connected to reading material, because Melrose Plant is reading it.

3.  The dog growls and barks again.

4.  Sunlight is streaming through the window, letting us know it's daytime.

5.  The dog is sitting in the snow -- it's winter -- outside the public house. Now the reader knows the Jack and Hammer is a pub.

As screenwriter Josh Olson has written:

It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you’re in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you’re dealing with someone who can’t.

(By the way, here’s a simple way to find out if you’re a writer. If you disagree with that statement, you’re not a writer. Because, you see, writers are also readers.)

Many, and perhaps most, readers aren't going to be as analytical as I am.  Many, and perhaps most, readers will read for pleasure and skip over the flubs and errors and inconsistencies that drive other readers bonkers.  It's possible for a writer to get away with this kind of writing in the age of digital publishing because there are far fewer gatekeepers.  Low-priced or free ebooks will almost always find a few readers, and unless the books are really outstandingly terrible, the authors can count on establishing at least a bit of a following.

That level of success may be sufficient for many, and perhaps most, self-publishing authors.  The collection of hundreds -- even thousands -- of glowing five-star ratings and reviews may also be sufficient.  On the other hand, if you really want to improve your writing so you can establish a following of readers who will pay more than the bare minimum -- or only read your books if they're free -- maybe give some of this criticism a thought or two.

After all, that's what you said you wanted