Criminal Divination

~ Troubled Blood, by Robert Galbraith ~

The latest Robert Galbraith is quite the tome, clocking in at an impressive 927 pages. Goody, I thought. Many evenings and weekends of reading a capable author showing off her craft, her undeniable ability with complex plots, and her brisk, engaging pace and character development.

In case anyone doesn’t know, Galbraith is JK Rowling’s alter ego, the alias under which she writes the Cormoran Strike crime series. Troubled Blood is the fifth in the series, and follows Cormoran and his business partner Robin Ellacott through a year of investigating another complicated crime.

This time, a woman has hired Strike and Ellacott to investigate the 40-year-old disappearance of her mother, Margot Bambourough. No trace of Margot has ever been found — no body, no reliable sightings from anywhere in England or abroad. Did she walk out on her husband and her young daughter? Or was she murdered, and if so, was it by Dennis Creed, the brutal serial killer who was operating at the time and is now in the Bradmoor hospital for the criminally insane?

Strike and Ellacott take on the case, although their agency is somewhat overwhelmed with other routine cases already. The agency has expanded: it now has three contractor detectives and a fulltime receptionist. Strike and the agency are considerably more famous after their previous cases, and they now have a waiting list of clients. Robin, too, is better known and needs to be careful to avoid recognition when on the streets. Strike still lives in a tiny flat above the agency, and is still often in pain due to his artificial leg. (I did wonder why he could not now afford a fancier and less painful prosthetic).

Galbraith/Rowling is still a good writer, with crisp readable prose that draws you onwards, along with an ability to explore the thoughts of the characters. Strike’s beloved aunt is dying, the father who abandoned him now wants a relationship, and his ex Charlotte (now married and a mother) continues to torture him with wistful reminders of her beauty and vulnerability. Meanwhile Robin is going through a contentious divorce. Strike and Robin’s personal lives feed very naturally into their work lives and behaviour, and the author brings our the personalities of minor characters as well: the matchmaking Ilsa, the irritable Dave Polworth, the sleazy Saul Morris and so on.

All seems set for a reliable fix of solid crime fiction. And yet, at the end, I find myself mildly disappointed.

A significant part of the book deals with the astrological ramblings in the notebook of the original police detective investigating the Bamborough case, and I must say those left me cold. I’m in the Strike camp:

“We’ve got enough mystic crap swimming around this case without adding star signs.”

Not only is there an analysis of every person’s star sign and how they relate to each other, but there are multiple astrological charts and connections along these lines

Twelfth (Pisces) found. Therefore AS EXPECTED killer is Capricorn.

There are also diagrams like this:

Perhaps Galbraith/Rowling had fun putting this together, but it really didn’t add much to the book except an additional 100 or so pages.

The detective agency is also investigating other cases, and those are rather a distraction to the main investigation. There are (likely realistic) descriptions of long hours spent watching this or that house, many nights spent sitting in a car outside a building waiting for that elusive moment to capture a target on film, and hours spent on the internet trying to track down people involved in the original Bamborough case. It certainly does give you a sense of the tedium of most detective work, but it can be rather tedious for the reader as well.

And lastly, I thought the final denouement was a bit of a cop-out. After most characters provided snippets of unverifiable information coloured by their own lies and feelings, one character suddenly turns up and pours out a detailed story. The solution to the crime is abrupt and mysterious, without many clues or pointers being provided through the course of the novel. It seemed rather like one of those ‘And then the detective had a brilliant brainwave and solved the case’.

Troubled Blood was controversial with the LGBT community because of Rowling’s statements about transgender people and the fact that the novel contained a serial killer who was a cross-dresser. Personally, I didn’t see anything upsetting or offensive in the novel: indeed, there was a killer who occasionally cross-dressed to lull his victims into a feeling of security, but there were other killers in this book and previous who are male, female, straight, apparently harmless or weirdly evil. Troubled Blood also has a very wholesome lesbian couple who are happily married and accepted by all: one of them has huge problems with her father, but those are largely unrelated to being gay.

So, not offensive, but not as good as the previous Galbraith novels.