Not quite the right word

So, I enjoyed the cozy Chloe Boston mysteries enough to pick up the ones they hawk so relentlessly in the back of the book (two chapters of one of them, which made the ending of one Chloe Boston story seems quite abrupt, judging by how much book I had thought was left). These are called the Book of Dreams series, about someone who mostly works in the Narcoscape, the land of dreaming, rescuing coma patients and the like. They're - well, it's, I've not quite finished the first one - not bad, though a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is (obviously) required. But the authors (the Chloe Boston writer and her husband) occasionally use the wrong word.

And I don't just mean the wrong shade of meaning.

For instance, at one point a character gives "a plaintiff howl". And in a description of a pool table there's a reference to "queue sticks". (Amusingly, Google ads knows I want 'cue sticks' though Google offers me pages of complaints about "print queue sticks")