Forced myself to finish reading Nancy J. Cohen's Permed to Death. It is the WORST commercially published novel I have ever read all the way through. It started with some promise (albeit a rather strange and unconvincing method of murder), and descended to the point where I assume the editor gave up in disgust and just let the atrocious dialogue and stiff, wooden, bloated narrative (not to mention preposterous interaction between protagonist and investigating police officer) pass. By the time I realized how the awfulness was escalating, I figured I might as well drag myself through the rest of it. Incredibly, that book, published in mass market paperback in 1999, has recently been republished.
The only rival for awfulness (and a book I was not able to finish reading) is Murder in the Swamp, by Dorothy Kliewer, which had the added awfulness of spelling and punctuation errors. (You can buy it used for a penny, and overpriced at that.) Here is an excerpt from my Amazon review of that one:
As I near the end of the book (I read on in morbid fascination) I am rewarded by the descent of the dialogue from merely stilted to luminously, transcendently horrible. NO ONE talks like that! For example to give the flavor, these lines come as a local resident (Lance) and lawman (Aaron) discuss the crime:
"Might not be insane," Lance replied, "could just be an evil person, a human predator of women."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
[Aaron speaks:] "Yes, strangled, but we don't know what was used to do that dastardly deed."
The dialogue has become so bad by this point in the book (p. 193 of 253) as to be hilarious. I am actually laughing out loud. It is as though the author simply reached a point at which she slapped down any words that came to mind simply to bring the book to an end. No editorial hand can have touched the manuscript.
I've turned to another Diane Mott Davidson effort, Sweet Revenge, to repair my mental state.
--Ken
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