Dirty Tricks: A Kate Lawrence Mystery by Judith Ivie Page A

vengeance seeker to choose the one woman in
Connecticut who not only isn’t afraid of bats but actually likes them. If this
is the work of a disgruntled aspiring author, he or she is having a lousy week
on a number of fronts.”
    May laughed so hard at that thought,
she had to fish around in her desk drawer for a tissue to blot her eyes.
    “Oh, it’s not as dramatic as I’m makin ’ it sound. It’s a simple matter to reject the really
bad submissions. I just express a little boilerplate regret that our beta
readers weren’t sufficiently intrigued by the three-chapter sample to request a
full manuscript and wish them the best of luck placing their titles elsewhere.
Send the reply, delete the original submission, end of
problem. It’s the almost-but-not- quites that have me
reaching for the Tums.”
    “Is that one of them?” I asked,
gesturing at the sheaf of papers she’d been reading when I entered.
    She wrinkled her nose. “It is.
Oddly enough, it’s from somebody who lives right around here.” She flipped back
to the first page. “The woman—at least, I assume it’s a woman—is obviously
using a pen name. I mean, Desirée L’Amour ,
seriously? But she has a post office box in Rocky Hill. That’s right next door
to Wethersfield, isn’t it?”
    I nodded. “She sounds as if she
has an exotic streak, all right. What’s the problem?”
    “As I said, it’s almost right, but
not quite. The descriptive passages are lovely, and the dialogue rings true, but
the romantic encounters are a little clumsy and forced. She writes about
passion like someone who’s read about it but never actually experienced it.
I’ll show you what I mean.” She shuffled through the sheets of paper and
selected one to hand to me. “ Here. Read this, and
then tell me what you think.”
    I accepted the page with
reluctance, hoping I wasn’t about to read anything too explicit; but after I’d
scanned a couple of stilted paragraphs, I saw what May meant. I handed the
sheet back to her.
    “Hmm, yes, technically correct but
kind of detached emotionally. It’s not likely to fire a reader’s imagination.”
    “That’s it exactly. After all, the
whole point of readin ’ a sexy romance is vicarious
enjoyment, and if you can’t imagine yourself in the heroine’s strappy sandals,
you may as well turn out the light and get a good night’s sleep instead of
staying up late to read.”
    “Uh huh, and you definitely want
your customers staying up late to read. I get it. So why are you struggling
over rejecting this one?”
    May laughed a bit sheepishly. “The
thing is , this lady can punctuate a compound sentence
correctly. She can spell and capitalize proper nouns and use a semicolon in the
right place. She uses ‘me’ instead of ‘I’ as the object of a preposition. Do
you know how rare all of that is?” She groaned and dropped her head into her
hands. “I can hardly bear to cut her loose. This would be one manuscript we
wouldn’t have to spend forty hours massaging into publishable shape. She can
compose a gorgeous sentence. She just can’t write ,
do you see?”
    I sympathized with her dilemma.
“It does seem a shame not to be able to use her considerable skills,” I agreed.
“Say, maybe you could soften the blow by offering her a job as a freelance
editor or proofreader or something. You have those, don’t you?”
    “All over the country,” May
acknowledged, “but I can’t see a woman who bills herself as Desirée L’Amour bein ’ thrilled
about editing someone else’s novel.”
    Sighing, she tapped the papers in
her lap into a neat stack and tossed them into the blue recycling bin that
stood next to her desk. “Oh, well. Best get it over with.” She retrieved her
computer spectacles from the top of her head and prepared to lower the boom on
poor Desirée .
    Hearing the office phone ring, I
waved goodbye and headed down the stairs to my own unpleasant tasks waiting in
the Mack Realty office.
    Half an hour or