Writing 101
This book is just cripplingly stupid. It's all I can do not to smash my face into the desk repeatedly. Allow me to summarize, in three parts, with the second part first and the third part second.
2. Colloquial usage is fine, but complete ignorance is not. I submit:
"If he'd have died two months ago, his story would have had a different ending." [That's Tracie oh-so-compassionately commenting that Tim, Trevor's murdered brother, is going to heaven rather than hell because he stopped being a junkie lately. Nice.]
"Heath wished it would have been a longer trip..."
"I learned self-defense. And you can believe if he'd of tried anything..."
BLARG. "Of," madam, is not a substitute for "have," and I don't even know what that fucked-up verb conjugation you were going for there might be called. I just know it's wrong. Where did you go to school, Sarah Palin's Finishing School For Kids Who Can't Read Good And Don't Want To Learn? This is what "You've got mail" hath wrought.
3. Dialogue tags are important. Nonverbal dialogue tags are idiotic. A few examples:
"I may have some contacts in the Navy who can help us out," he draped a comforting arm around her shoulder.
"It's okay," she placed a calm hand over his nervous fingers.
"Twelve," he did the math quickly in his head.
"I will be," Heath felt his parents' absence acutely.
"It's an analogy," she smiled back, then sobered.
See the problem? None of those verbs-draped, placed, did, felt, smiled-are words that indicate talking. They are actions. This is epidemic throughout the book; all of those examples come from one scene.
1. I'm not expecting Harlequins to include, like, Stephen Ambrose-level research. But a little cursory Wikipedia isn't too much to expect, is it? Here's the problem: Tracie's murdered ex-partner, Trevor, is not really dead. He's a bad guy who's trying to kill everyone. So she and Heath are investigating. They go diving in an underwater cave and find a conning cap on the bottom of Lake Superior. Heath declares that a conning cap is what submarines use to break through the ice (not true) and that their find obviously means a submarine was in the cave, which is, oh, 300 or so feet long/wide/ish. They immediately begin debating what kind of sub could fit in there, and decide that a shark class midget sub could totally fit, being 50 feet long with a crew of four. Yeah. Two things: Shark class subs were built by the British and used during World War II. They were about 200 feet long, so they weren't midget subs, and they haven't been manufactured since the war. Midget subs are usually used for research or rescue, like the Alvin, which discovered the wreck of the Titanic, and the now decommissioned DSRVs. You know what these little subs don't have? Conning towers. Which no subs have had, really, since Pearl Harbor.
And then Tracie goes off on an insane expository paragraph about how there were two midget subs lost with all hands during the Gulf War and how one of them was never discovered, so from there she and Heath (who is supposed to be in the FBI, for frak's sake) decide that this missing sub, the Requiem, is obviously the one that ran aground in Lake Superior 14 years ago, causing Tracie's father's death during the rescue mission, and now the eeeeeevil diamond smugglers fraudsters are using it for more nefarious purposes.
So that's all bullshit. I spent about an hour last night talking to my brother and to Suzy's husband, both of whom have spent more than their fair share of time around submarines, to figure out what, if anything, was accurate. Came to the conclusion that she had, at least, spelled "submarine" correctly in most instances. So my problem isn't that the author has just made up stuff. She can make up whatever silly nonsense she likes; this is fiction, after all. But it's ridiculous to make up shit and give it the name of a real class of subs. Why not just invent a class? I'm sort of leaning toward "Unicorn class." It would be just like the Nautilus! Come to think of it, doesn't that earlier nonsense totally sound like the really batshit parts of Clive Cussler's Sahara, where Dirk Pitt finds a Confederate ironclad with the corpse of Abraham Lincoln inside it in the Sahara desert? God, that would be so much more fun to copyedit. I bet Dirk Pitt's misused dialogue tags are all manly verbs, like "hulked" and "loomed" and "swashbuckled."
2. Colloquial usage is fine, but complete ignorance is not. I submit:
"If he'd have died two months ago, his story would have had a different ending." [That's Tracie oh-so-compassionately commenting that Tim, Trevor's murdered brother, is going to heaven rather than hell because he stopped being a junkie lately. Nice.]
"Heath wished it would have been a longer trip..."
"I learned self-defense. And you can believe if he'd of tried anything..."
BLARG. "Of," madam, is not a substitute for "have," and I don't even know what that fucked-up verb conjugation you were going for there might be called. I just know it's wrong. Where did you go to school, Sarah Palin's Finishing School For Kids Who Can't Read Good And Don't Want To Learn? This is what "You've got mail" hath wrought.
3. Dialogue tags are important. Nonverbal dialogue tags are idiotic. A few examples:
"I may have some contacts in the Navy who can help us out," he draped a comforting arm around her shoulder.
"It's okay," she placed a calm hand over his nervous fingers.
"Twelve," he did the math quickly in his head.
"I will be," Heath felt his parents' absence acutely.
"It's an analogy," she smiled back, then sobered.
See the problem? None of those verbs-draped, placed, did, felt, smiled-are words that indicate talking. They are actions. This is epidemic throughout the book; all of those examples come from one scene.
1. I'm not expecting Harlequins to include, like, Stephen Ambrose-level research. But a little cursory Wikipedia isn't too much to expect, is it? Here's the problem: Tracie's murdered ex-partner, Trevor, is not really dead. He's a bad guy who's trying to kill everyone. So she and Heath are investigating. They go diving in an underwater cave and find a conning cap on the bottom of Lake Superior. Heath declares that a conning cap is what submarines use to break through the ice (not true) and that their find obviously means a submarine was in the cave, which is, oh, 300 or so feet long/wide/ish. They immediately begin debating what kind of sub could fit in there, and decide that a shark class midget sub could totally fit, being 50 feet long with a crew of four. Yeah. Two things: Shark class subs were built by the British and used during World War II. They were about 200 feet long, so they weren't midget subs, and they haven't been manufactured since the war. Midget subs are usually used for research or rescue, like the Alvin, which discovered the wreck of the Titanic, and the now decommissioned DSRVs. You know what these little subs don't have? Conning towers. Which no subs have had, really, since Pearl Harbor.
And then Tracie goes off on an insane expository paragraph about how there were two midget subs lost with all hands during the Gulf War and how one of them was never discovered, so from there she and Heath (who is supposed to be in the FBI, for frak's sake) decide that this missing sub, the Requiem, is obviously the one that ran aground in Lake Superior 14 years ago, causing Tracie's father's death during the rescue mission, and now the eeeeeevil diamond smugglers fraudsters are using it for more nefarious purposes.
So that's all bullshit. I spent about an hour last night talking to my brother and to Suzy's husband, both of whom have spent more than their fair share of time around submarines, to figure out what, if anything, was accurate. Came to the conclusion that she had, at least, spelled "submarine" correctly in most instances. So my problem isn't that the author has just made up stuff. She can make up whatever silly nonsense she likes; this is fiction, after all. But it's ridiculous to make up shit and give it the name of a real class of subs. Why not just invent a class? I'm sort of leaning toward "Unicorn class." It would be just like the Nautilus! Come to think of it, doesn't that earlier nonsense totally sound like the really batshit parts of Clive Cussler's Sahara, where Dirk Pitt finds a Confederate ironclad with the corpse of Abraham Lincoln inside it in the Sahara desert? God, that would be so much more fun to copyedit. I bet Dirk Pitt's misused dialogue tags are all manly verbs, like "hulked" and "loomed" and "swashbuckled."