Troubled Blood: Winner of the Crime and Thriller British Book of the Year Award 2021 (Strike) Paperback – 24 Jun. 2021

I read this book on my kindle so didn't realise how long it was until I saw some of the reviews on here - all I was aware of was a delightful experience that pleasingly went on for rather longer than with the average novel.I've read all the books in this series. I appreciate the writing style and am particularly enjoying the development of the relationship between the two main characters. To me, this book seems to be the best of the five so far, encompassing many interesting themes and a complex mystery which I completely failed to solve, so top marks for that!Having said that, I don't think this is a perfect book - I found the many references to astrology rather a waste of time - I could be wrong, but I don't think they were in any way pivotal to the plot. I spent quite a long time trying to take in details of the zodiac and which character was what sign etc., and trying to make out the details of the diagrams, which are very difficult to read on a kindle - ended up taking photos of them and then expanding them on my phone in order to be able to see them properly - all a complete waste of time I fear because I don't think any of them had any bearing at all on the who-did-it plot.I also find the crime details in the Strike novels rather too graphic for my taste - for examle, I think it's sufficient to say someone is a serial killer and torturer without specifying exact details of the tortures meted out.Nevertheless, I have to give the book five stars - it's such an excellent read (in my case genuinely un-put-down-able).Oh, and by the way, just to reaffirm something that's been said in other reviews (and this is not a spoiler) - the serial killer is not trans - he's unequivocally heterosexual but occasionally uses female clothes as a device to fool his victims. Before reading this book I had nothing against trans people and I still don't have anything against them :-)

Cormoran Strike gets hired to solve a decades old disappearance case, after an initial botched investigation by the police. After a chance meeting with the prospective client whilst visiting his ailing aunt in Cornwall, a fire is lit within Strike and the hunt begins. So starts another mesmerising, page-turning, utterly captivating mystery from Galbraith, that may just be the best of the series yet.We fall into the world of horoscopes, tarot cards and signs of the zodiac, as Strike and Robin diligently work their way through clues, witnesses and suspects, trying to find their way through the maze of untruths, lost causes and forgotten facts.The journey we are brought on is so smooth and joyous that the 900 pages were a pleasure from start to finish and I almost wished it were longer at times so that I wouldn’t have to put the book away.The quality of writing and the editing are what make this book so easy to read. There is rarely an unnecessary passage. All the while a sense of atmosphere is ever present, as is character development, which makes you all the more invested in how everything will play out.The back and forth between Robin and Strike is one of the linchpins to this whole series and Galbraith really ramps it up in this instalment, to, surely, every fans pleasure.This is a series that I find just gets better and better with each book (though I was not the biggest fan of Career of Evil) and I will eagerly await the next one too.

Troubled Blood, as I'm sure pretty much everyone already knows, is the fifth novel in the Cormoran Strike series written by JK Rowling under the pen-name Robert Galbraith. Rowling recently made some comments which many people (including me) considered transphobic, and when this book was published, some people said they found the content transphobic too. Having now read the parts of the book to which those critics were referring, my feeling is that if they'd been written by someone whose views on trans rights weren't known, they wouldn't have been interpreted as transphobic. But now that JK Rowling has apparently decided to start being openly trans-exclusionary, it certainly comes across as, at the very least, insensitive to include a relatively arbitrary (albeit minor), reference to a man disguising himself in a wig and a woman's coat in order to do women harm.That's pretty much all I'll say on that matter, because much as JK Rowling's views on trans rights disappoint me deeply, they really have nothing to do with the book itself, and it's the book I'm supposed to be reviewing.The book begins with private detective Cormoran Strike and his business partner Robin Ellacott taking on a cold case: the disappearance of Margot Bamborough. Margot, a GP, disappeared one evening in the 1970s. Was she murdered by Dennis Creed, the sadistic serial killer now serving a life sentence? Or did she simply run away? Her daughter, just a baby when Margot disappeared, is desperate to know, and believes Strike might be her last chance to find out. In the meantime, Robin is going through a tricky divorce from her appalling husband Matthew, while Strike is being bombarded with messages not only from his unstable former fiancée Charlotte but also his estranged rock star father.Like all the books in the series, Troubled Blood is an extremely well-plotted, labyrinthine mystery with a vast cast of characters, and the ever-present subplot of the will-they-won't-they relationship between Strike and Robin is expertly done as always and almost worthy of a novel in itself. That might be why this book is the size of a breeze-block, although I suspect the novel's bulk has more to do with the fact that JK Rowling has so much clout that she's able to ignore her editors' advice, because Troubled Blood really doesn't need to be 850 pages long. JK Rowling is of course a consummate storyteller and as such, I didn't find the length of the book a drag - just unnecessary. There are incidents, details, conversations and backstory that we simply don't need: JK Rowling as Robert Galbraith is the polar opposite of crime writers like Cara Hunter and Sarah Hilary whose books are tightly written and pacey. I don't especially mind the rambling, as I love Strike, Robin and their world and I'm happy to spend extra time there, but some readers will undoubtedly become frustrated.Even without the padding, there's plenty of plot to be going on with. The central mystery is pleasingly complicated, with an array of vividly portrayed characters involved. Because the mystery here is a cold case, Strike and Robin have to build their investigation around some unreliable sources of information. The witnesses they interview are recounting memories that are over forty years old, and the notes they have from the police investigation of the time were compiled by an officer who was in the grip of serious mental health problems and convinced of a link between Margot's disappearance and the suspects' zodiac signs. There's an awful lot there for our detectives to unpack, and for me, the zodiac pieces of the puzzle were probably the weakest elements of the story (again, I think a less famous writer's editor would have asked her to say goodbye to them), but I found the characters and their many secrets and lies convincing and absorbing.The threat posed by men towards women is a continuing theme in Troubled Blood, and not just in the context of Margot Bamborough's disappearance and its potential connection with Dennis Creed, whose crimes were characterised by sexual violence. Robin herself also finds herself up against a lower-level form of oppression from a new colleague, as she is casually undermined and dismissed professionally by men who all to keen to be involved with her personally. There's a particular moment towards the end of the novel where I wanted to cheer, but no spoilers.If you've read the other books in this series and you liked them, you will like this one too. If you haven't read the others, this isn't the one I'd start with - primarily because the non-mystery plot elements and character development in the Strike books carry over from book to book, so you do need to read them in the right order.