Death Dealer by Hayden Lockhart (Plagiarism)

My rating out of 5:1

A Rabbit Hole...

This is going to be an interesting review...

Long story short, Hayden Lockhart doesn't exist, and the contents of this book are plagiarized from a mystery box subscription... here's my review of it from last year:

"I found this self published work (printed by KDP) at goodwill. The price on Amazon is $250.00. the cover art has nothing to do with the story, and the author name is the name of the main character. It's merely a collection of journal entries, and places marked to open boxes of evidence, for example: "open evidence #1." After reading this, I'm pretty sure the person who uploaded this to KDP just copied the text using Google lens off of a weekly crime solving subscription like Hunt a Killer. Where journal entries and evidence is sent to you in the mail, and you try to solve it. I think they took the journal entries from a month's subscription, scanned them, extracted the text, typeset it, then uploaded it under the pen name of the main character."

Well, Why is this turning into a whole blog post?

Recently I went back to check on this book, and dug a bit deeper.

I found that there is indeed a mystery box subscription company (named Murder Mystery Box) that sells a mystery box titled... you guessed it, "Death Dealer." And guess who the main character of that mystery box story is? Hayden Lockhart, of course.

Yeah, I was right back in 2021 just by reading the thing.

All it took was a google search now (2022) and I found the proper owners of the story.

Image taken from Murder Mystery Box's product page for the Death Dealer mystery box.

From there, I tried to find out where the cover image came from. Obviously the body of the work was stolen, and the title font was chosen to match that of the image used on Murder Mystery Box's product page.

Doing a quick search using google lens, I found another book using that cover. The title of which is:
My Book of Magic: Journal for Spells...

This notebook didn't have a title on the cover, although it's front and back cover art is exactly the same as the Death Dealer by Hayden Lockhart.

Cover of the witch notebook.

I found a tan colored version of the art piece on Overstock.com. The piece is titled "Crow Perching on Tree" by Design Art. 

Other plagiarized titles

After finding out that the work was plagiarized from Murder Mystery Box, I wondered "how many more of their mystery boxes are plagiarized?"

So I checked.

On the Murder Mystery Box's website, they have a large list of "one time mystery boxes."  I chose a random one, took the name of it, plus the name of the main character, and searched them on google. Sure enough there it was. Another plagiarized book for sale on Amazon, this time for $390.74!

Conclusion

Sometimes, self publishing allows opportunity for copyright infringement. 

Links

Check out Murder Mystery Box's website and Facebook Pages:

Website

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