I recently finished the latest Immortal Doc Holliday book, Indebted. I could only give it three stars, unfortunately. I enjoyed it, I guess, but Doc is way too OP so putting him in big fights early in the book has very little dramatic effect since we know he’s going to win. I understand what the author was trying to do with Doc’s story at this point, but there was something that kept pulling me out of it.

Stated. And drawled.

I feel like every couple of pages the author used “stated” instead of “said”, as if she had gone through the document with a “find” command on the word “said” and removed instances of it that weren’t necessary — similar to how I do the Six Words. But as I’ve posted in the past, “said” is an invisible word that it’s okay to overuse. Still, it wasn’t as annoying as her overuse of “drawled”.

To me a drawl is a southern or western way of speaking — a “southern drawl”, if you will. Doc doesn’t strike me as the type who often speaks with a drawl, not anymore, not after being alive for a couple of centuries. Maybe he’s doing it for effect, which is fine, but every few pages? And, remember, when I say “page” I mean “screen of text on my phone”, not actual pages of text.

Why did Doc keep drawling so much? Was he trying to be overly sarcastic? Some of the things he drawled weren’t very sarcastic. Maybe she was trying to say that he was speaking lazily; I really don’t know. All I know is that it was distracting me because I kept trying to figure out how it was meant and how it should sound. At least with “stated” I know it’s just a way to avoid saying “said”, but “drawled” is a little harder to comprehend. Especially when it’s overused.

One thing I will say, though, is that the author is getting a touch better with her choices to describe sex. She’s still showing a ton of violence but only a little sex, but at least now she’s raising the curtain ever so slightly and saying the characters are actually having sex — although there’s an awful lot of slanted mouths and feathering touches. Overuse draws attention, and anything that draws attention away from the story and into the mechanics is generally a bad idea.

Also… those cheekbones! Does anyone really look like that?