Negative Positive
Title: Hardly a worthwhile purchase
Review: The plot is poor, the characterizations are simplistic, the solution is arrived at without any deduction, and the writing is stuffy and overblown. What's to like?I might have given it 2 stars if it were not for Ms James' extraordinarily irritating verbal tic -- "hardly". "I would hardly ask him that", etc. Hardly a common turn of phrase but it appears that Ms James can hardly write a paragraph of dialogue without it.
Is the review positive or negative? 