** spoiler alert ** I came to know about this book from the author himself, when he sent me a note asking if I could do a review. The bibliophile that I am, I never say no to a book. So that's how I came to read this book.

The book is a murder 'mystery' (I'll explain the quotes) - a young girl is found murdered in her home and the immediate suspect is the married man with whom she was having an affair. There are 2 cops trying to unravel the mystery and to add to all this, there's a parallel thread with posts from a blog, written by an anonymous blogger. Who confesses to killing a girl.

Think what you want, but that got me interested. But sadly, that's pretty much the only interesting part in my entire read.

'The Blogging Affair' is an extremely shoddy, insipid and poorly written book. Not to mention, the complete lack of proper editing. Not to disparage the author or anything, but there are such gaping holes in the plot that I'm really surprised it even got published. Even if I ignore the typographical errors (there were loads and I cannot ignore them, to be honest - if you can't take the effort to correct typos in a book, you have no business being an author or a publisher), I cannot overlook the non-existent plot and the extremely crappy writing. And the writing? I've seen mediocre blogs with a better handle on the language than this book has.

What's the matter with the plot? Let's see - I figured out who the murderer was at Chapter 4, page 28. The book was 340 pages long. I'm not kidding. Hence, the quotes on 'mystery'.

There are 3 PoVs in the book: the blogger (or the blog posts), the married man having the affair with the murdered woman and finally, the cops.

The blogger: The first 3-4 chapters of this PoV is all that's needed in the book. The rest of the 10-15 odd ones can plain be deleted and it would not matter one teensy bit. And the big deal about this part is that we do not know if the blogger is the married man or not. Well, the pains the author has gone to to not use words that'll give out the sex of the blogger (no he/him/she/her etc.) was like a big red indicator pointing to the fact that the blogger is a woman.

The married 'sex-crazed' (the author's description) man: Total WTF narrative here. I mean, here's a guy who gets a call from the cops saying they suspect him in a murder and all he can think of is his male reproductive organ, booze and his missus/mistress. Extremely shallow characterization and absolutely no credibility or a base on reality.

The cops: Again, total waste of paper. The whole narrative was very artificial. Oh, the best part? Know how the cops figure out the blog is written by a woman? Because one of the blog posts mention something about the blogger seeing red blood in a dream. Didn't get it? Apparently, only woman dream in color. Men dream in black and white. That was the cop's reasoning on how he figured out who the blogger is.

And all this, when the cops already have a print-out of the whole blog and the very first/second post of the blog, the blogger mentions that she's a she and she's in love with a she and that she's married to a he. Yeah. Einsteins, the bunch of them!

All in all, a total waste of time, effort and money. Do not, under any circumstances, pick it up. Far more interesting to sit staring at a blank wall than read this.

Forget 1 on 5 stars, I'm giving it a -1 on 5.