For a decade now, J K Rowling has steadfastly refused to allow the mutual passion between her fictional detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott to be consummated, even though the blazing chemistry evident from the opening pages of her first pseudonymous “Robert Galbraith” novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013), has deepened into unspoken love on both sides.
Of course, Rowling is canny enough to know that her delaying her readers’ gratification is one reason they keep returning to the series – getting Strike and Robin into bed too soon would be akin to killing Voldemort off halfway through the Harry Potter series – but at the current rate it looks like we’ll have achieved net zero before they’ve even held hands for the first time.
Naturally, I’m not going to give away whether this seventh entry in the series takes their relationship any further forward, although I will say that – unlike with the seventh Harry Potter book, which ended with Harry, Ron and Hermione married off to the loves of their lives – we seem a long way from a definitive ending to the saga.
Things certainly don’t look good from Strike’s perspective at the beginning of the book, as Robin is enjoying an apparently successful relationship with Ryan Murphy, the C I D officer she met in the last volume (and a man much more conventionally good-looking than Strike, who – in a description so familiar that it’s come to have the status of a Homeric epithet – is once again described here as “a broken-nosed Beethoven”).
Rowling has never been afraid of alienating readers by displaying her hero’s unreconstructed side, manifested here in Strike’s amusingly bitter rants about things like Murphy buying theatre tickets: “it suggested a dangerous degree of effort. Eight months into the relationship, [Murphy] should surely have stopped pretending he’d rather watch a play than have a decent meal followed by sex.”
Lonely and desperate, Strike allows himself to be comforted by a randy, loopy lawyer improbably called Bijou, with unfortunate consequences. Sadly, he doesn’t know that Robin is detecting in Murphy an unfortunate level of similarity to Matthew, her jealous, controlling ex-husband (this is the reddest of red flags – few writers have ever shown such naked loathing for one of their creations as Rowling has for Matthew).
Despite all this, and while Strike’s trying to cope with harassment from his mad ex-girlfriend, Charlotte, his shaky relationship with his long-lost sister and a diagnosis of dementia for his adoptive father, Ted, the duo do have time to do some detecting. They’re hired by retired civil servant Sir Colin Edensor to investigate a body called the Universal Humanitarian Church, which has recruited his son Will and is fleecing him of his trust fund money. Robin agrees to go undercover as an eager recruit at the UHC’s base, a farm in Norfolk.
