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Summary
Summary
In the epic fifth installment in this "compulsively readable" ( People ) series, Galbraith's "irresistible hero and heroine" ( USA Today ) take on the decades-old cold case of a missing doctor, one which may be their grisliest yet.
Private Detective Cormoran Strike is visiting his family in Cornwall when he is approached by a woman asking for help finding her mother, Margot Bamborough--who went missing in mysterious circumstances in 1974.
Strike has never tackled a cold case before, let alone one forty years old. But despite the slim chance of success, he is intrigued and takes it on; adding to the long list of cases that he and his partner in the agency, Robin Ellacott, are currently working on. And Robin herself is also juggling a messy divorce and unwanted male attention, as well as battling her own feelings about Strike.
As Strike and Robin investigate Margot's disappearance, they come up against a fiendishly complex case with leads that include tarot cards, a psychopathic serial killer and witnesses who cannot all be trusted. And they learn that even cases decades old can prove to be deadly . . .
Author Notes
Robert Galbraith is the pseudonym used by J. K. Rowling, who was born on July 31, 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England. She is the author of the Harry Potter series. She also wrote the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, and The Casual Vacancy using her real name. She has won several awards over the years including British Book Awards for Outstanding Achievement, British Book of the Year for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, and the Hugo Award for best novel for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Under the name Robert Galbraith, she has since written The Cuckoo's Calling, The Silkworm, and Career of Evil which are part of the Cormoran Strike series.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Galbraith's superb fifth novel featuring London PI Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott (after 2018's Lethal White), his two leads land a cold case while dealing with major personal problems: the aunt who raised Strike is dying of cancer, and Robin is going through a painful divorce. In 1974, GP Margot Bamborough walked out of her London practice to meet a friend, and was never seen again. The case was originally assigned to Det. Insp. Bill Talbot, who believed Bamborough fell victim to a serial killer, Dennis Creed, but Talbot suffered a mental breakdown while pursuing that theory. Creed, who was arrested in 1976 after a failed abduction attempt, refused to say whether he snatched Bamborough. Almost four decades later, the doctor's daughter, who was one at the time of her mother's disappearance, persuades Strike to try to solve the mystery. As Strike and Robin follow up the slimmest leads and seek to trace any living witnesses, Galbraith (the pseudonym of J.K. Rowling) never loses sight of the tragedy at the heart of the assignment. The painstaking, prosaic investigative work keeps the reader engaged for the duration of this doorstopper. Galbraith will surely have lost some fans due to a controversy that preceded the book's publication, with critics calling the novel transphobic because Creed had dressed as a woman while committing some of his crimes. Those still in the author's camp, though, will likely consider this to be the best series entry to date. Agent: Neil Blair, the Blair Partnership (U.K.). (Sept.)
Guardian Review
Robert Galbraith's Troubled Blood is not for the faint of wrist. Clocking in at a cool 927 pages, the fifth Cormoran Strike novel knocks Hilary Mantel's The Mirror & the Light off the top spot for the biggest big book of 2020. Galbraith, otherwise known as JK Rowling, has form. The fifth Harry Potter was a similar whopper, dividing the legions of fans ecstatic to be gifted so much Hogwarts from its critics, who wearied of the boy wizard's adolescent angst and longed for something to actually happen. Troubled Blood will, I suspect, divide readers in much the same way. For those Strike aficionados long captivated by the will-they-won't-they relationship between the detective and his agency partner, Robin Ellacott, there is much to be savoured. A year on from Lethal White, both are juggling work with complicated personal lives. Strike's aunt, who brought him up, is terminally ill; he and his sister are at loggerheads and his tricky ex-fiancee, now married with twins, isn't going away quietly. Ellacott is contending with a messy divorce and the unwelcome attentions of the agency's newest hire, handsome ex-police officer Saul Morris. Galbraith's unhurried examination of their emotional turmoil adds depth to both characters and convincingly stokes the simmering tensions between them. The agency's newest case, meanwhile, is in fact a very old one. In 1974, a doctor, Margot Bamborough, disappeared from her surgery in Clerkenwell. A botched police investigation meant she was never found. Forty years later, Margot's daughter is determined to find out what happened to her. The investigation that follows is a ferociously gnarled cat's cradle of leads involving a psychopathic serial killer, a London crime syndicate and a full cast of unreliable witnesses, all served with a generous dash of astrology, tarot and the occult. A scrupulous plotter and master of misdirection, Galbraith keeps the pages turning but, while much of Troubled Blood is terrific fun, it is hardly a hair-raising ride. With jeopardy thin on the ground, the languid pace and the elderliness of the mystery (and indeed most of the suspects caught up in it) combine to give the enterprise the unthreateningly cosy air of old-fashioned Sunday night TV drama. When the denouement finally comes, it is not quite satisfying enough to justify the page count. Strike and Ellacott, however, remain one of crime fiction's most engaging duos. As I close the book, I am already eager for the next instalment. I just hope my aching arms can take it.
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.