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I'm all in favor of good excerpts. That way, I can find out if a book's characters are flat (though it wouldn't have helped that mystery, I suppose) or, for that matter, if they use too much or too little profanity. Too little? Yes ... a character one would expect to say a "naughty" word saying "heck" instead also grates on the ear. It's not authentic to the character.
That leads to another interesting situation, with regard to substitutions: For a number of years, I played a MMO in which profanity was utterly forbidden. A character could be essentially banned for a single naughty word, and an entire account for several. In posts, I am sometimes prone to writing "@#$%#$" as sort of an inarticulate growl of rage. I was informed that I couldn't do that, as it might represent profanity, and if I didn't mean something "naughty" I should type it out in full. Some time after I'd left, several players in a group event were banned for saying "FTW" ("for the win", if you've never met it -- it was something like "red team FTW!!!" after a victory) because the "F" might conceivably not mean "for". Most notably, the programmers put in a filter which turned, for instance, a certain word into "maid" -- a nominally safe word. But after a while, they started punishing people for saying "maid", following the logic that they might have said a word that was turned into "maid" rather than just, y'know, saying "maid", so they should be treated exactly as though they'd typed profanity -- even if they hadn't, and had just used a word the programmers had deemed safe. Yes, they made "maid", "dog", and a few other words into "bad" words because they might be program substitutions for other words.
That makes me wonder about substitute profanity. Take "heck", for instance, as a substitute for "hell". It means the same thing. The person who says it is thinking the same thing. The person who hears it understands the same thing. In either case, it's referring to the Christian place of damnation. Why is the euphemism permitted? Or take the Orthodox Jewish substitution of "G*d" for "God". Both '*' and 'o' are symbols on the keyboard. Why does it matter which one you use when you type it? They're both referring to a primal deity, and they mean exactly the same; it's really a matter of how you draw the symbol in the middle.
So why would saying "zark" instead of, say, the infamous F-bomb make a difference? The author knows what "zark" means. You know what "zark" means. If "zark" or "tanj" or "frack" or "donkey tails" means the same as some taboo word, why substitute? It's the intent and meaning that matter, not the exact string of characters being used to convey it. If you shouldn't be thinking "F-word" then you shouldn't be typing "tanj" if it means the same thing.
I'm reminded of the story of the ruler who wanted to find a person who was absolutely pure. He sent his Grand Vizier out to search for such a person, but everyone the Vizier questioned had heard the word ... well, let's say "zark". For years he traveled the country, but he could find no one who had not heard the word. Finally, he heard of a child who had been raised by deaf parents and learned to read from books. He went to seek out this child, and by circumlocutions, determined she had indeed never heard the word "zark". But he was doomed to disappointment when, in his final question that was intended to elicit the horrible word if she'd ever heard it, she said "oh, you mean 'gleep'".
If you're not going to use a word, then don't use the word. But using some alternative spelling for the word doesn't change anything. Characters who say "zarking" are still swearing in their understanding, even if it isn't the same string of characters in ours.
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