I like to consider a book review in three sections: 1) plot, characters, locations, 2) quality of writing, especially dialogue, 3) editorial accuracy. It’s on the basis of these categories that I figure out what sort of ‘score’ to rate a novel, using the Amazon 5-star method.

The Dealer’s Daughter by Granville Brown only gets two stars. Here’s why.

If you extract the skeleton of the plot from the body of the text, it’s quite good. There are some holes, particularly related to police procedure, but nothing that couldn’t be ironed out. The characters are also nicely different and interact with each other well.

But here’s the thing. The plot and characters are let down by the quality of writing. This focuses way too much on unimportant details and is generally unconvincing. The dialogue is stilted, and all the characters speak in pretty much the same way.

This isn’t helped by the large number of errors in the text – spelling, punctuation and grammar errors. I know I’m a professional proofreader so would be the sort of person to pick these up. And of course you can find typos in almost any publication. But trust me, there are far too many in this book. I doubt it was ever properly proofread.

So The Dealer’s Daughter gets a couple of stars courtesy of its plot structure and its characters, but falls down in the categories of writing quality and editorial accuracy.