Bad Book No Biscuit

I just finished--or got as far as I was able to go without completely losing patience--a mystery set in San Francisco in the 1880s. It does all the things that I hate in historical novels: I have no doubt that the author did scads of research, for there are lots of little local color bits and historical factoids, but the protagonist (a woman who has set up a law practice in the teeth of social and familial disapproval) is so forward-looking it made my teeth itch; there are all sorts of 2000s attitudes that the good characters espouse, or at least look like they'll come round to espouse sooner rather than later. Our heroine, who is not interested in marriage, clearly has not one but two potential suitors in the wings (always so much better to be wanted than to want to be wanted). Little social details go wrong; at least according to Emily Post 50 years later, a young woman would still have been addressed as "Miss Susan" rather than Susan by a person not of her family. The author gets the social attitudes that involve disapproval of our heroine, but misses the daily formality and dismisses class as snobbery and, and, and...

And it's filled with clichés (why must the children be tucked snugly into their beds? Couldn't they have simply been put to bed? Just for the difference of it?). And the typos and errors! Anyone can make a mistake or seven; God knows I do. Which is why there are editors, and copyeditors and proofreaders and galley proofs; so that a sentence in which someone threatens to "sue for liable" will not make it to print.

Yugg. Just: yugg.