You have echoed my feelings, exactly. It was sad to see how flawed this book has been thus far, with little hope on my part of things improving.
I am only about where you are in the book and I still want to see if at least the storyline is worth pursuing. As you note, there is not much connecting this Charlie Chan to the one created by Earl Der Biggers and developed in the film series. To me, it feels like we are meeting a Chan from an alternative universe.
It is another great sadness to me that too many writers today, not to mention Hollyweird, TV, and virtually all contemporary media and "entertainment," feel the requirement to appeal to the baser human nature. The immediate employment by the author of the sexual references that you noted reflects that. And those "multitudinous" graphic (not really typographical) errors! How could those not have been noticed by anyone even skimming through the material? I was even wondering if the proofreading was actually performed by some poorly designed computer program! Or, perhaps by someone not totally familiar with the English language, as we note the many words that should have been plural but mysteriously lack the all-important "s" at the end?
Something similar happened with a book about Charlie Chan movies that came out a number of years ago. I wonder if the small-scale, self-publishing entities tell their authors that they provide a proofing service, which, in the end, is woefully inadequate.
"Hope for the best, expect the worst." It seems we received the latter...
