Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I started reading Grafton's alphabet series 20 years ago when I was 12 years old. I've kept up with them avidly since then, usually finishing the new release the day it comes out and whining that I now have to wait 2-3 years for the next installment. Though there were a few stinkers in the preceding novels, I've been shocked by how bad this book is. The typos alone are inexcusable, but the entire book suffers from a severe lack of editing. Paragraph upon paragraph of tedious description and insignificant details coupled with every single character spouting completely unnecessary exposition and all doing so with the same narrative voice, does not make for good writing nor good reading. Grafton seems to have forgotten that Kinsey is only 38, and a fit 38 at that, as she gives her asides about not knowing how she'll get up from sitting on the ground and other problems only a much older person and/or someone far more out of shape than her heroine would even think about. Grafton, also, gives us 88 year old Henry in 198whatever saying he and someone "hung out" for a while and uncountable instances where quotation marks inexplicably appear as the Mary Sue of the scene picks right back up telling Kinsey the rest of the exposition which had been narrative in the previous paragraph. And, then, there are the lists of California flora...Lists. Plural. If the similarities between her 'drama queen' male characters were meant to reflect on each other, the effort failed because nothing about the behavior was ever illuminated and, instead, we just had four very similar characters floating through the book behaving redundantly; likewise, none of the strays in the book were used to any effect by comparison with each other or their relationships with the world, either. Finally, I found the attitudes expressed about 'the homeless' -- who are presented as a universally monolithic tribe -- to be both wildly naive and incredibly patronizing; I expected more of Grafton, as I'd expect more of anyone over the age of about 15. Whether it was because the publishers knew people would buy W regardless of what was between the covers, deadlines were missed, the contract required a page count Grafton didn't have enough story to fill properly or because Grafton refused to have her 'artistry' tampered with, it's clear an editor never came close enough to this manuscript to get a paper cut. We'll likely never know why W got published in the sorry shape it's in, but I sure hope the quality picks back up for the remaining 3 novels; it would be a real shame to go out on a note like this one.