A high-concept comic crime thriller aims to update the grand English tradition but hits wide of the mark.
The protean English broadcaster, columnist and sportswriter Lynne Truss is best known internationally for Eats, Shoots & Leaves, her 2003 lament for the decline in standards of punctuation. It was a delight to pedants everywhere, including this one, not least because they enjoyed spotting its several dozen errors and internal contradictions: the first appears in the subtitle, The Zero Tolerance Guide to Punctuation, a phrase that, as she makes clear at some length in the text, requires a hyphen between “zero” and “tolerance”, because it is a noun phrase being used as an attributive adjective (as in “stainless-steel saucepan”).
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