As the first few words jumped off the page with bold excitement, the detective's anticipation for a riveting adventure quickly turned into dour dread as he realized the novel was just a hackneyed sham-- a labyrinth of grammatical errors, cliché characters, paucity of plot-- endless run-on sentences strapped together by semicolons, bandaged by commas, filled with innuendos of ellipses, plagued by a patchwork of pointless parentheses, colons that marked nothing and dashes that created roads to no where; all in a vain attempt to synthesize a plethora of remotely connected ideas into a coherent best seller: in fact it reminded him of his latest case.