Published in 2020, this is the fifth in the detective series written by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling). So it follows on from Lethal White, which I read last year.

The action is set in 2013/14, but it's the first cold case that redoubtable tecs Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott have attempted (they're trying to find out what happened to Dr Margot Bamborough, who disappeared in 1974, and in particular they want to establish whether she ended up in the hands of serial killer Dennis Creed, who, though in prison, is still withholding information about some of his victims).

It's also the first one of the series that I read in English (having had a previous tradition of reading them in Indonesian).



And what can I say...? I guess the bottom line is that it kept me reading, and I wanted to find out what happened. That's something.

Otherwise, I think this is very flawed book.

First, let's deal with the allegations that the novel is transphobic. You can read some of the proponents of this viewpoint here and here. For me, the message of the story is more that there are people you instinctively trust (because of their age, gender, and/or role) that you really ought to think twice about. But you ought to think twice about ANY of them -- doctors, nurses, priests, the lot -- not just about men who occasionally don dresses with a view to lulling vulnerable women into a momentary false sense of security. Nevertheless, given the controversy that was stirred up by Rowling's statements on transgender people earlier in the year of publication, I totally agree with Alison Flood and this blogger that it would have been more tactful not to give the serial killer this particular characteristic... Unless you're actually out for notoriety...

(The whole sad business about who uses which toilets, by the way -- pronouncements on which were part of Rowling's 2020 comments -- came back again only recently, when Britain's Supreme Court decreed that the word "woman" refers to "a biological woman", and "the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) issued interim guidance that, in places open to the public, trans women -- people who are biologically male but identify as female -- shouldn't use women's facilities such as toilets". The Supreme Count decision is one that J.K. Rowling campaigned for. While we're on the subject, though, it's worth noting that a number of studies boil down to this: "There is no empirical data at all supporting the view that transgender individuals pose a threat to cisgender individuals in public restrooms." It is also the case that "US states that have allowed trans people to use the facilities corresponding to their gender have seen no increase in sexual harassment or assault in public restrooms".)

Anyway, although I understand the point of view of those who take issue with the book on those grounds, my problems with it are rather different.


Robin: "I used to love coming to Skegness when I was a kid." This is the town where our intrepid pair tracks down a suspect, now running a boarding-house with his wife

My main complaint -- and this is shared by a number of reviewers -- is that it's FAR too long. Our paperback (yes, this was a real book) weighed in at 927 pages... Wah... That's substantially longer than Lethal White, which was at that point the longest in the series. (To illustrate, the Troubled Blood audio-book comes to 31 hours and 51 minutes of listening, whereas its predecessor, whose length I was already complaining about back then, lasts 22.5 hours.)

But, you might ask, doesn't length give Galbraith/Rowling more scope for character development? Well, yes and no. Most readers are probably sympathetic to the obvious attraction that has arisen between Strike and Ellacott, and the more romantic among us are probably wishing they could make something of it; on the other hand, we're sympathetic to what is a very genuine problematic: Can you turn a successful working relationship into something more -- especially when both partners suffer from PTSD, and each has endured a bad relationship that has left severe scars? But to have this all dragged out over the entire (and substantial) length of yet another book is really starting to test our patience. (Spoiler: We leave the pair of them going off for a birthday dinner, so let's hope, for goodness' sake, that they decide either to move on, or to for ever hold their peace, and not bug us any further with this stuff.)

Misogyny is a key theme, and it's an important one. But it was tackled very heavy-handedly, and the characters illustrating it are rather cardboard-cutout.

And while we're on the subject of unsubtlety, I HATE the clumsily phonetic rendition of people's accents, so that Cockneys have to say "I fink" instead of "I think", and Irish people "dat" instead of "that". Either you know what an accent sounds like in your head, or you don't. If you don't, you'll get no clear idea from this nonsense.

I'm also well sick of Charlotte (a previous girlfriend of Strike's who, zombie-like, keeps laying her tedious stuff at our feet).

Finished yet?

No.


"There's usually a bracing breeze off the North Sea"

There were a couple of side-plots that I felt we could have done without (the predatory new freelancer the agency employs is one obvious candidate, as is the whole business of Strike's errant dad; but we also get more information than we need on the agency's other cases; and the zodiac framework -- the original police detective who worked the case was descending further and further into mental illness, and had started to try to solve everything on the basis of astrology -- became a bit heavy after a while).

There are also some REALLY naff bits... Example: "Robin was struck by the odd idea of a reverse nativity. The three Magi had journeyed toward a birth; Margot had set out for the Three Kings and, Robin feared, met death along the way."

And -- let's be brutally honest -- there is a TON of sheer verbiage in Troubled Blood that really should have been edited out. You start to wonder whether J.K. Rowling is now so famous that no-one dares suggest that some of the words she produces really need to be CUT... Examples: "'Coffee?' suggested Anna, and both of them accepted... 'Come here, you silly animal,' said Kim, getting up to lift the cat clear and put her back on the warm wooden floor... They ordered food; after swiftly scanning the menu, Robin asked for a chicken and bacon salad; Satchwell ordered steak and chips."

Yawn... Believe me, there's LOTS more where this came from.

I find chapter epigraphs (this lot come from The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser) a little pretentious in a book of this nature, but I'm very open to the possibility I'm being undiscerning (some people really get into them).


Leamington Spa, 2017. One of the suspects is having an art show here, and it's also the birthplace of Aleister Crowley, who gets several mentions in the book. (We came across him in Cefalu, where he lived -- very, very weirdly -- from 1920-23)

There were definitely things I liked. Sometimes, Galbraith/Rowling picks up on emotions in a way that really resonates. Here's Strike, for example, pondering his return to Cornwall: "He had an odd double impression of being exactly where he belonged, and where he'd never belonged, of intense familiarity and of separateness." Yep...

And there are some great scenes. Perfume-buying is reprised a couple of times in comically/tragically different versions. And the scattering of Strike's aunt's ashes at sea is genuinely moving.

But No. 6...? I'm really not sure...


Senglea, Malta, January 2025. I got all excited about some references to the Knights of St John, but they didn't come to anything...