Death by Desire

This is my fourth Jaden Skye novel, as well as my last. As described in a prior review, the book was filled with typos and misplaced and misspelled words.
I find I unbelievable that a publisher can go to press with such a badly edited book, and I will NOT be reading another Jaden Skye novel. They are just atrocious in their bad editing!

Jim Weaver
Author and Songwriter

Boilerplate novelist, Jaden Skye is a hack writer who has no respect for the technical aspects of her craft (or her readers). I can forgive an author’s limited vocabulary, or clumsy sentences that change tense mid-stream. But when the writing’s consistently slovenly, novel after novel, there’s no excuse. Skye’s typos and grammatical conundrums will have most readers e-ranting within the first few chapters. Most of the comments on her dozen Caribbean Murder novels, the same criticism is repeated: books are riddled with myriad errors. I guess Skye either doesn’t read the Amazon reviews, or her persona is thicker than sharkskin. The novels read like first drafts.

There are the usual misplaced possessive apostrophes, and missing conjunctions; Skye arbitrarily capitalizes random nouns, and leaves proper nouns lower case–sometimes with unintentional meaning. “I’ll handle this mother,” Lynch tried to intervene. Is he swearing, or addressing his mother? (LOL, she’s even got a typo on her web page: Jaden skye.) And when in doubt, Skye uses inventive spelling. I guess she’s not aware of spellcheck and other resources on the the web.

In Death by Desire, Jaden Skye is name-challenged: she conflates characters–she confuses her protagonist Cindy with the victim, Tiffany. Sometimes the dead girl is speaking. Oops! Cindy’s sister Ann becomes Anne, depending upon the paragraph. Another reviewer asked if the “victims mothers’ name Meryl or Myrtle?” She also has conflicting gender issues: a guy named Frances vs Francis? The fianc suddenly becomes a fiance. Sex change? She uses the word heroin for heroine. Talk smack.

And Skye repeatedly repeats dialogue. Didn’t I just read that? Skye’s unsure of compounds words, so she separates them, which makes for tedious sentences: “he was an ego maniac.” Forget using the word: redhead. That’s too compound a thought. To shore up weak verbs and nouns, she uses a plethora of adjectives and adverbs. Skye should banish all forms of beauty from her limited working vocabulary. Especially the word “beautiful.” In Death by Desire, she uses the word beautiful(ly) a whopping 70 times. Thesaurus much?

I’ve read most of the Caribbean Murder Series because they were initially offered free. Locales are all Google-generic, I doubt if the author’s been to the Caribbean. Skye’s stronger on dialogue than sentence structure. She has an interesting, if formulaic, storyline, and can cut a good yarn, but the plot tends to be thin and two-dimensional as the characters themselves. And the same old clichs and tropes become tedious after a few novels. For someone who lives out of her suitcase, Cindy is always stepping out in immaculate pastel linen dresses. Really? How does she do it living out of her suitcase, on the road, in the tropics, no less?

Note bene: This review is a revision. I came undone and wrote a compound review for book number 8, so some examples were pulled from several of her books. (See my review of Death by Obsession). I didn’t have the heart (or stomach) to write a different review for each novel, as I’d need to revisit the books, and that would be pure torture.

Suffice to say Death by Desire is a particularly rough draft. I kept thinking that Skye’s writing skills would improve over time. Not happening. My flabber is gasted. She needs to hire a boatload of proofreaders. Better to save your money, and especially your valuable time–for a more deserving writer.

I would like to rate this higher. It holds my interest as far as a storyline, but the storyline in inconsistent and the grammatical errors are something I just can’t read past. I tried in the beginning to ignore them, but cannot. I see other reviews that show that this is consistent with previous books in this series. I can forgive indy authors for errors, but they should listen to customer feedback.

Many misspelled words and incorrect grammar. I was very disappointed in the quality of the processing of this series. Story was fine but had a hard time trying to figure out what they meant. I never purchased books with poor spelling and grammar. Are they not reviewed before going to print? ??

Jaden Skye’s “Death by Desire”, the fourth book in the Caribbean Murder series, finds detectives Cindy and Mattheus on the beautiful island of St. Barts to investigate the death of Tiffany O’Connell who is a twin sister to Rori, and also sister to Wynn O’Connell from a U.S. Senator’s family. The senator and his wife and children go to St. Barts every year to vacation on their yacht, but this year was special. They were celebrating Tiffany’s engagement to her fiancee, Tad. It was after the engagement party that Tiffany’s body had been found stabbed several times and left lying on the beach. Her mother was beginning to unravel and her father had little patience with the mother. Tad was beside himself with grief, and it was Christmas.

In this mystery, Cindy and Mattheus have their work cut out for them as they tackle the search for who killed the senator’s daughter. There are many suspects in the story, including the Russian mob, and the detective team leave no stone unturned.

This is a very enjoyable mystery that takes place in beautiful surroundings, but it is in need of editing very badly. Tiffany’s mother’s name at the beginning of the book is Meryl, but by the end of the book it is Myrtle. Missing words, extra words all make for interruptions in the flow of reading and enjoyment of the book.

I gave this book 3 stars because of the editing problems, but without those it would have gotten 4. I have enjoyed the first three books in this series and I hope the next one, “Murder by Deceit” is better edited. The story, however, is good.

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