I have. And I often find it frustrating, but it’s not the author’s fault. Let’s take Kate Moreton as an example. If you’ve read her first, The House at Riverton where Grace worked as a servant for the Hartford family back in the 1920s when a suicide occurred in their mansion, I’m sure you were as riveted as I was to this mystery. Then came The Forgotten Garden that is one of my favourites of Moreton’s where a child arrives on the Australian docks unclaimed and doesn’t even know her name. A childless couple adopt her. Only some sixty years later does she try to unravel her past and work out how she ended up in Australia from England. My other favourite was Secret Keeper where Dorothy’s daughter Laurel witnesses her mother kill a man she’s never seen before, and she has no idea why.

But what about her most recent two—The Clockmaker’s Daughter and Homecoming? Have you noticed something different? It’s not the mysteries. It’s the writing. I call it lazy editor syndrome. We all love Kate Moreton’s books so much that it feels like editors don’t think they need to bother editing because we’ll read them anyway. I’m no professional editor, but surely any reader must have felt that the first chapter of The Clockmaker’s Daughter should have been scrapped. I was totally confused by the end of it. And what about Homecoming? Didn’t you get tired of scenes being repeated? At least fifty pages could have been edited out. I didn’t care about Officer Duke missing his family’s Christmas dinner that late in the book either. I wanted to get to the mystery. And the editor certainly didn’t pick up on the school holidays. School holidays in Australia never happened in September. I remember them in August.

This is something I’ve noticed with a number of established authors. Their first few books are spot on, then it seems editors must assume their best selling authors don’t need to be edited.

• Writing tips