Too long by a couple of hundred pages but still skillfully told, with a constantly gleeful interest in human awfulness.
J.K. Rowling returns with the fifth of her Cormoran Strike series of detective thrillers, and the blood flows fast.
At the opening, we find Strike at a pub—he’s never far from an adult beverage—when he’s approached by a young woman with a strange tale. Her mother, Margot Bamborough, a general practitioner, disappeared from her clinic—in 1974. Strike, working his first cold case, Googles the doctor’s name only to find that her disappearance had aspects in common with ones attributed to the very unpleasant Dennis Creed, who kidnapped, raped, murdered, and beheaded his victims—sometimes, in a choice that will raise red flags coming from Rowling, while dressed in women's clothes. Now locked away, Creed is just one of the suspects who emerges in the course of Rowling’s overlong but propulsive yarn, each of whom seems to have the job of pulling Strike away from the elusive truth. Fortunately, he has Robin Ellacott, his associate, to get him back on course: He is the muscle and the mover, prosthetic leg notwithstanding, but Robin has a talent for ferreting just the right bits of information out of people. And what people there are: a supposedly drug-addicted colleague of Margot's; the son of a cop who investigated the disappearance and slowly went mad in the process, leaving notebooks of speculation behind that increasingly turned toward the astrological and supernatural; prostitutes and minor drug dealers; a young man with a penchant for animal abuse; a philandering fellow, several of whose girlfriends wind up inconveniently dead; even a couple of vicious gangsters. Then there’s Creed himself, a minor Hannibal Lecter whom Strike takes pleasure in deflating: “She was murdered by a far more skillful killer than you ever were,” he tells the psychopath. Ouch! After wading through a barrel of red herrings, Rowling—beg pardon, Galbraith—delivers the real killer, the least obvious of the lot, and it’s a masterful, perfectly thought-through revelation.
Too long by a couple of hundred pages but still skillfully told, with a constantly gleeful interest in human awfulness.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-49893-7
Page Count: 944
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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