I'm reading this book from the eighties that my dad gave to me (it was his first) because he thought I would be interested in it. It's about a hospital where one of the doctors does and she turns out to have an overdose of aspirin in her blood. I'm only half way through, so I have no idea who did it, but I am already pretty annoyed: the stated blood levels of the aspirin in her blood aren't nearly enough to kill her! At least not if they're using modern units, but book is annoyingly unclear about this, and just states milligrams. Not milligrams per something, when aspirin blood levels are supposed to be reported as mg/L.
That reminds me of someone who complained about a House episode where the mystery illness was... I think phosphate poisoning, which they said is on the very first page of their textbook.
This isn't terrible but it's definitely an annoyance: fantasy setting where it's relevant that certain characters are a different race (as in human phenotype, not orcs and elves) from the rest, but it's never made clear what those races look like. The characters aren't described in any way which implies racial phenotypes of any sort, just by height and build and such, and their races are called by the names of the fictional regions they're from but not enough detail is provided about those fictional regions to make it clear if they're supposed to be based on real ones and the one they're actually in is Generic Fantasyland which is probably European but no more specific than that. If it's a point in the story that some characters look different from others, it sorta helps if the writer explains how they look different.
"The Wee Free Men" is mostly a very good book, but to say her power is "First Sight and Second Thoughts" Tiffany sure doesn't put any thought into things she thinks are beneath her. I don't know, Tiffany, maybe Hansel and Gretel so rudely ate the witch's house because it was a plot point that they were starving to death?
Spoiler: CSA discussion Rather disgusted that I've encountered two books this year whose authors don't seem to understand why child molestation is bad. It's a bit rich to have your protagonists be fighting a pedophile ring while constantly going on about how the adult female lead is so psychologically broken that she no longer understands what sex is and her childlike behaviour is what attracts the male lead to her, or to condemn the bad guys for abusing male children and teens while the adult male protagonist's sexual relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl is portrayed as the healthiest relationship either of them have. Gross.
Melodramatic scenes where characters "communicate in silence, deeper than words" will never not bring to mind how Enoby and B'loody Mary "talked to each other in silence".
