In a story that claims “subterfuge, jealousy and dirty tricks in the world of literature,” London’s Daily Mail reports that the reader’s reviews section on Amazon — which “offers supposedly independent verdicts from customers” — has actually turned into a place where “rival publishers are accused of hijacking the system to praise their own volumes and disparage the opposition” and “[a]uthors are turning on each other, agencies are charging up to £5,000 to place favourable fake reviews and Amazon has recruited a team of amateur critics to restore the balance.”

The Mail‘s Nick Fagge reports that, “One author, Rosie Alison, became so incensed by a series of barbed reviews on the website that she called in investigators to see if rival publishers were behind the stinging criticism.” Alison, who “is a producer for the company behind the Harry Potter films,” got 16 one-star reviews (out of 119 reviews total), including one that “implies that the author’s success is connected to her marriage to Tim Waterstone, founder of the chain of High Street bookshops.”

Another writer, Polly Samson, “has suffered sneering reviews on Amazon because she is married to David Gilmour, the Pink Floyd guitarist,” says Fagge. “Her most recent book, Perfect Lives, published this month, was the target of some vicious criticism.”

The reviews Fagge cites, however, seem intelligent enough and not all that “vicious.”  A critic of Samson’s book of stories writes, “Every story seems to be a variation of Samson fictionalising the life she probably has as Mrs D Gilmour. I’m sorry, Polly, but this book bored me. You need to leave home.” A critic of Alison’s, meanwhile, says simply that Alison “has no feel for fiction at all, no sense of what makes a plot tick along, no flair for language.”

One case that does seem to substantiate the charges, however, is eerily reminscent of last year’s shocking story about fake-review writer and (formerly) eminent historian Orlando Figes: Another prominent historian, Simon Winder, has “forced Amazon to remove a critical review of his book Germania after he discovered it was written by a rival academic”- Diane Purkiss, of Keble College, Oxford. ”

And, while cases such as those of Alison and Samson seem dubious — at least, given what the Mail cites — Fagge also speaks to Nathan Barker, of the p.r. firm Reputation 24/7, who claims he regularly manipulates Amazon’s reader review section for publishers for fees starting at £5,000: “First we set up accounts. For a romance novel we’d pick seven female profiles and three males. We’d say we like this book but add a tiny bit of criticism and compare it to another book.”