Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee Zalk

Author:   Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling)

Genre:   Fiction, Crime, Suspense, Thriller, Mystery

944 pages, published  September 15, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Troubled Blood is the fifth book in J.K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike detective series.  Strike and his partner Robin Ellacott are hired by a woman whose mother, Margot Bamborough, disappeared forty years ago in 1974 without a trace.  As they investigate this cold case, Strike and Robin encounter tarot cards, a psychopathic serial killer and witnesses who cannot be trusted, along with their own long simmering feelings for each other.

Quotes 

“We aren’t our mistakes. It’s what we do about the mistake that shows who we are.”

 

“Every married person he knew seemed desperate to chivvy others into matrimony, no matter how poor an advertisement they themselves were for the institution.”

 

“Then he closed his eyes, and like millions of his fellow humans, wondered why troubles could never come singly, but in avalanches, so that you became increasingly destabilized with every blow that hit you.”

 

 “. . . she’d seen a flicker of something in his face that wasn’t mere friendship, and they’d hugged, and she’d felt . . . Best not to dwell on that hug, on how like home it had felt, on how a kind of insanity had gripped her at that moment, and she’d imagined him saying ‘come with me’ and known she’d have gone if he had.”

 

“But he was her best friend. This admission, held at bay for so long, caused an almost painful twist in Robin’s heart, not least because she knew it would be impossible ever to tell Strike so.”

 

“But people who fundamentally change are rare, in my experience, because it’s bloody hard work compared to going on a march or waving a flag. Have we met a single person on this case who’s radically different to the person they were forty years ago?”  “I don’t know . . . I think I’ve changed,” said Robin, then felt embarrassed to have said it out loud.  Strike looked at her without smiling for the space it took him to chew and swallow a chip, then said, “Yeah. But you’re exceptional, aren’t you?”

 

 “How could he say, look, I’ve tried not to fancy you since you first took your coat off in this office. I try not to give names to what I feel for you, because I already know it’s too much, and I want peace from the shit that love brings in its wake. I want to be alone, and unburdened, and free.  But I don’t want you to be with anyone else. I don’t want some other bastard to persuade you into a second marriage. I like knowing the possibility’s there, for us to, maybe . . .  Except, it’ll go wrong, of course, because it always goes wrong, because if I were the type for permanence, I’d already be married. And when it goes wrong, I’ll lose you for good, and this thing we’ve built together, which is literally the only good part of my life, my vocation, my pride, my greatest achievement, will be forever fucked, because I won’t find anyone I enjoy running things with, the way I enjoy running them with you, and everything afterward will be tainted by the memory of you.

 

 “If I’ve taken you for granted,” said Strike, “I’m sorry. You’re the best I’ve got.”

 

“I think there are a lot of nutters in the world, and the less we reward them for their nuttery, the better for all of us.”

 

“He was well aware that he hadn’t told Polworth the whole truth about his relationship with Robin Ellacott, which, after all, was nobody else’s business. The truth was that his feelings contained nuances and complications that he preferred not to examine. For instance, he had a tendency, when alone, bored, or low-spirited, to want to hear her voice.”

 

“And there was something more, something highly unusual. Strike had never once made her feel physically uncomfortable. Two of them in the office, for a long time the only workers at the agency, and while Robin was a tall woman, he was far bigger, and he’d never made her feel it, as so many men did . . .”

 

“The roses, which were for Joan, were also for him: they said, you won’t be alone, you have something you’ve built, and all right, it might not be a family, but there are still people who care about you waiting in London. Strike told himself ‘people,’ because there were five names on the card, but he turned away thinking only of Robin.”

 

“. . . Strike explained about his failed attempt to buy Robin perfume, the previous December.

‘ . . . so I asked the assistant, but he kept showing me things with names like . . . I dunno . . . “Shaggable You” . . . ‘  The laugh Robin failed to repress was so loud that people turned to look at her . . .  and I panicked,’ Strike admitted . . .”

 

“Robin was thinking, is this where single people end up, people without children to look out for them, without double incomes? In small boxes, living vicariously through reality stars?”

 

“She’s lived with it for forty years . . . People who live with something that massive stop being able to see it. It’s the backdrop of their lives. It’s only glaringly obvious to everyone else.”

My Take

Having read the four previous Cormoran Strike novels ( The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm, Career of Evil and Lethal White) I was really looking forward to Troubled Blood.  I was not disappointed.  While J.K. Rowling is adept at spinning an engrossing mystery, this series really shines when it focuses on the protagonists Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacot.  The two are fascinating characters and the “will they, won’t they” dynamic really works.  At 944 pages, Troubled Blood is a commitment to read, but it is well worth the time.