The other day, a friend of mine informed me of strange doings on my Amazon pages.  Checking the site, I discovered five reviews of my books, all one star, all by the same person – SevenTimesSeven – all nasty and dismissive.  In fact, with a single exception, they were essentially the same review put up repeatedly.  It was a blatant attempt to lower my overall ratings.

I was puzzled for a moment, but not for long.  On the same date that appears on the reviews, I had a run-in over AT e-mail with a woman indignant about a blog item from a particular writer.  She at first posed only as a concerned citizen, but as events proved, it seems that she fancies herself to be something of an LGBT activist, doing what LGBT activists do best.  

I gave her a straightforward answer.  Needless to say, that didn’t work, and the exchange grew a little heated.  Eventually, she gave up – as is usually the case – and flounced off, insisting that I was harassing her.

Okay, just another day at AT – until those reviews turned up.

Now, it’s no big deal – most of those volumes are many years old, and a single review won’t help or hurt them.  But here’s the thing.  Checking Ms. 49’s (as we’ll call her in honor of her AMZ handle) Facebook and Twitter pages, it turns out that she works for Publisher’s Weekly, the venerable publishing industry magazine read by libraries and publishing companies coast to coast.  Her position?  Book reviewer.

Now, Ms. 49 didn’t read any of my books.  This is physically impossible, considering the minuscule time lag.  The kid writes ’em thick, and reading 450,000 words in a handful of hours...not even Evelyn Wood could manage that.  And yet Ms. 49, a professional book reviewer, put up five reviews pretending to detailed knowledge of the books in question.  This is hard to see as anything else but open fraud.

It’s nowhere near as bad as, say, a gay surgeon deliberately botching an operation, or a gay cop harassing straight motorists.  But it’s all of a piece with the tactics of some in the the LGBT movement, which are typical of any of the modern ideological movements, based as they are on crushing all opposition using any tactic whatsoever.  This is vicious, spiteful, and in the end, self-defeating.  Which is not to say that it should be tolerated or allowed to pass without protest.

Ms. 49 is undermining her own professional standards to make an ideological point.  It makes you wonder how she handles her reviews at the magazine.  It also might be interesting to learn what her superiors at PW think of it.