Dying For Charisma

Rating:
Summary: Good Story with Flawed Execution: Dying For Charisma
Review: This is one of those books where an interesting premise is flawed by the execution. My copy had numerous typos or misspellings as well as several fundamentally flawed sentences that provoked unintentional amusement. Not to mention the fact that photographic evidence uncovered by the hero of this book, Lindsey Dyson, would have been caught from the beginning by any half way competent medical examiner. In this day of authors such as Patricia Cornwell, or the extensive books on the subject from the various writing organizations and others, such a fundamental flaw is surprising and a real deterrent to the work.

As the novel opens, Lindsey Dyson is a star investigative reporter for the Midland Press. As such, she expects to be assigned to important cases that are worthy of her talents. Instead, she has been assigned along with her partner, Roger, by the paper's editor, Oliver, to what has been classified as a suicide.

Fuming the whole way over to the deceased woman's house, she is convinced that there is no story to be found worthy of her talents. The husband is distraught, but coherent, and is convinced that his wife did not commit suicide, as the Police believe. His evidence consists of a pill bottle found by her dead body, for a medicine she never took. Also, her moods had shifted dramatically since moving up an executive position with Charisma Fashion and Design.

Lindsey grudgingly promises to check into the case. She goes back to the paper and quickly learns from Oliver that the dead woman is one of four suicides in the last several years by women at the company. In each case, the woman was a top executive and the Police had determined the death was a suicide. Oliver tells her the names of the other reporters and the investigation begins.

Like everything else in life, quality control matters. While many reviewers would have given up in disgust with the noted problems, I continued on, trying to see past the problems to the kernel of story. The story itself and its elements are very good stuff and well worth the read. However, the technical flaws noted above weaken the work tremendously. Based on the issues noted above, this is one ebook that apparently had zero editing and clearly needed it. And that is a major problem for the author as well as the reader. When a book that has an engaging story to tell as this one does and has major editing issues, the overall read is diminished severely.

This could turn out to be a very good series with some technical improvement based on the copy I was sent some time ago. One hopes since it was an e-book the flaws were found and fixed because the actual story was pretty good. Hence the three stars which was a compromise between a 5 for story and a 1 for technical stuff.