Review: Troubled Blood, Robert Galbraith

This is a series I these days anticipate as much as I used to annually anticipate the new Lee Child, though I have to wait a bit longer for these (fair enough, as you can see, they are getting exponentially longer).

The series follows private detectives Cormoran Strike, a surly, bear-like ex-military cop and Robin Ellacott, a polite, pretty, whip-smart ex-secretary. This is their first cold case: the disappearance without trace of young doctor Margot Bamborough 40 years ago. Long assumed, but never proved to have been a victim of a notorious serial killer.

A traditional plot at face value and a welcome return to the murder mystery format for me, as I have been yearning for one. Though perhaps not as purely escapist as usual, given coincidental elements shared with the Claremont serial killer case, which I couldn't help but be chilled by, given how recently those details surfaced in court.

This congruence might partly explain the sense of menace achieved in a book about a cold case, but credit also goes to Galbraith for attempting to examine what makes human beings cross over from plain violence, with evident causes and motives, into true evil, a preoccupation that has only grown over his most recent titles.

It's an exercise in pure imagination, and that's where this author shines – that and plotting, and this book has as diabolically clever a plot as any other from him (or her).

But it's not just character and plot that make this compulsive reading – astoundingly, at 1000 pages I only wished it longer – but the drawn-out emotional tension between the two detectives that is, by book five, positively tantalising.

Frankly, I can't fault this novel. The best I can do is that I noticed a couple of editing errors in the same descriptive phrases getting repeated a little too often. That's the only criticism I can beat up.

Surely going to be one of my best reads of the year. Just world-class, nailbiting, classic crime from a master. I absolutely devoured it.