To start off with, Galbraith’s (JK Rowling’s pseudonym) “Troubled Blood” has an interesting premise — a woman, Anna, hires protagonists Cormoran Strike and his business partner Robin Ellacott, to investigate the disappearance of her mother, Margot Bamborough, a London-based GP. The interesting part is that Margot disappeared 40 years earlier and we have Strike and Ellacott revisit the lives and motivations of several possible suspects, some of who are dead, including an incarcerated serial killer, Margot’s husband at that time, her medical colleagues, patients and friends. And in between trying to solve this case, Strike and Ellacott must grapple with other cases and personal issues such as his terminally ill aunt, his suicidal ex-girlfriend, Robin’s PTSD from an earlier incident and her messy divorce. That gives enough material for Rowling to make this a 900+ page book, without it dragging at most times!
The mystery is of a high quality. The various characters are fleshed out well and the reader is privy to most developments through the book. Astrological clues are also neatly woven in the narrative, in the form of the scribblings of the initial investigator who slowly lost his mind. For a change, at least in my view, Rowling has handled the emotional elements, especially the potentially romantic track between Strike and Ellacott, quite well. I always thought that romance was the weakest part of the Harry Potter books and the Strike-Ellacott relationship was handled awkwardly in the earlier books in the Cormoran Strike series. This time however, there is far more maturity (and far less cringe)!
Rowling has borrowed the title of the book from Edmund Spenser’s epic poem, “The Faerie Queene”, and has a verse from the poem as an epigraph to each chapter. The epigraphs, very cleverly, appear to have clues to the direction of the story. Given my unfamiliarity with the poem, these allusions escaped me but (important: the following link has major spoilers) http://strikefans.com/the-faerie-queene-epigraphs/ is a very good source to understand the linkages between the poem and the book.
The missing star in the rating is for the excessive length. While, as mentioned above, the book does not drag for most of its length, the reader tends to lose the plot and forget the characters if they take a long time to finish the book (for example, it took me a month and half to complete this book due to a lack of time to read). Rowling seems to be going the way of the Harry Potter series with the Strike books — the first two books were about 450 pages long, the next two were 500 and 650 respectively, “Troubled Blood” (the fifth of the series) is almost 950 pages long and “The Ink Black Heart”, which has just released has crossed the 1,000-page mark!
Pros: Interesting premise, fast-paced towards the end, relatively better handling of the emotional parts
Cons: Excessive length
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