Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

A favorite device of the Writer's Digest Books imprint is to collect a couple dozen magazine articles under some organizational headings, add an introduction by a well-known genre name (Sue Grafton, in this case), and publish it as a book. I've found these collections to be uniformly unsatisfying, short on real how-to information and long on shopworn cliches. Writing Mysteries is no exception. The biggest failing of Writing Mysteries is that, regardless of what the table of contents promises, it presents no real strategy for approaching the complex task of planning and writing a book-length manuscript. Many of the chapters were clearly written to fill magazine column space. They cover topics that have been covered elsewhere time after weary time, too often in an off-hand or precious manner, and they tend to give empty advice - where do you get ideas? anywhere; do you use an outline? sometimes; and on and on. Worse, many of the chapters are rambling and poorly organized, and some deal only tangentially with the topic announced in the chapter title (or subheading). There are useful tips here, but you have to mine the whole mountain to find the nuggets. You'd do better to purchase a single-author, comprehensive guide to writing mysteries. You'll get those nuggets of writing wisdom, along with a lot more actual how-to information.