354. Lethal White
Rating: ☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by:
Author: Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)
Genre: Fiction, Mystery, Crime
650 pages, published September 18, 2018
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
Lethal White is J.K. Rowling’s fourth book featuring Private Investigator Cormoran Strike and his partner Robin Ellacott. It opens with Billy, a mentally troubled young man, telling Strike “I seen a kid killed…He strangled it, up by the horse.” This statement sets Strike and Ellacot off on a hunt that turns into a murder investigation of a member of Parliament.
Quotes
“Pretending you’re OK when you aren’t isn’t strength.”
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” Robin contradicted him. The champagne had fizzed on her tongue and seemed to give her courage even before it hit her brain. “Sometimes, acting as though you’re all right, makes you all right. Sometimes you’ve got to slap on a brave face and walk out into the world, and after a while it isn’t an act anymore, it’s who you are. If I’d waited to feel ready to leave my room after—you know,” she said, “I’d still be in there. I had to leave before I was ready.”
“I was in therapy for a bit. Now I do CBT exercises.” “Do you, though?” Strike asked mildly. “Because I bought vegetarian bacon a week ago, but it’s not making me any healthier, just sitting there in the fridge.”
“Life had taught him that a great and powerful love could be felt for the most apparently unworthy people, a circumstance that ought, after all, to give everybody consolation.”
“How often were you aware, while it happened, that you were living an hour that would change the course of your life forever?”
“Because men’s crimes are always ours in the final analysis, aren’t they, Mr. Strike? Ultimate responsibility always lies with the woman, who should have stopped it, who should have acted, who must have known. Your failings are really our failings, aren’t they? Because the proper role of the woman is carer, and there’s nothing lower in this whole world than a bad mother.”
“The feel of her was both new and familiar, as though he had held her a long time ago, as though he had missed it without knowing it for years.”
“As suddenly as they had reached for each other, they broke apart. Tears were rolling down Robin’s face. For one moment of madness, Strike yearned to say, “Come with me”, but there are words that can never be unsaid or forgotten, and those, he knew, were some of them.”
“I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people inside it. It took this… all of this mess… to make me realize I can’t go on. I don’t really know when I stopped loving him,”
“Look me in the eye and tell me you’ve loved anyone, since, like you loved me.”
“No, I haven’t,” he said, “and thank fuck for that.”
My Take
The reason to read Lethal White isn’t the mystery at its core, which is fine but a bit convoluted at times. The reason to read it is the superb portrait painted by J.K. Rowling of Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacot, the two main, recurring characters in the Cormoran Strike series. They are so richly drawn and so accessible that it makes reading the book worthwhile.
