The Ink Black Heart
Robert Galbraith
1248 pages
Published 2022
🖤🖤🖤🖤
June is the Book Review Crew’s designated thriller month, so I’m posting some old reviews of recommended action, mystery and crime books.
I’ve read this twice – first in audiobook form in 2022, when I noted that I would like to read it again later as I felt I’d get a lot more out of it the second time round. Then the giant doorstopper paperback went round my Book Club and it was a good time to dive back in. I can confirm that enjoyed it even more the second time – partly because it only took a week, rather than a month for the audiobook, so I had a much better handle on who all the characters were, but also because knowing the twists in advance made spotting all the cleverly paced clues so much fun. Now I can’t wait to see how they adapt it for TV.
Original review from 2022:
The Ink Black Heart is the latest (and longest) instalment in the deliciously complicated Cormoran Strike mystery series. I’ve read all of these in order, which is helpful but not essential, and as with the previous books, the audiobook is very capably narrated by Robert Glenister. From comments I’ve seen online, it seems this was a better choice than the Kindle format, but perhaps not as easy to follow as the treebook, since a large part of the content is online chat between a multitude of characters with weird names, so you really really have to pay attention to try and work out who’s who. The controversy about what the author did or did not say apparently rages on, and the themes in this book are clearly a response to this, but it’s still a clever multilayered crime story about two of the most interesting characters in modern crime fiction.
Cormoran and Robin have a new problem – keeping up with the workload generated by their previous successes. When a dishevelled young woman asks for help in unmasking a troll known as Anomie, who has been persecuting her online due to her success in creating a cult YouTube animated series called The Ink Black Heart, Robin refers her on to a more suitable agency. Then she hears that Edie Ledwell has been murdered in Highgate cemetery, where the cartoon action takes place, and the agency is hired to investigate. How does the murder relate to an online game controlled by sinister misogynists with links to a Far Right terrorist organisation?
This was over 32 hours in length – that’s a lot of car journeys for us, although the benefit of listening together was being able to compare notes of who each character was and what we thought was going on. Like the last book, it is far too long – padded out by the repetitive online discussions and sometimes irrelevant subplots that just add extra characters to try and keep track of – like the other cases the team are working on – our heroes spend a lot of time doing surveillance that isn’t very interesting. I would expect that most people reading this will have either read at least some of the preceding books or seen the TV adaptation, and so understand the painfully awkward attraction between Robin and Strike that is continually thwarted by their pride, wilful blindness and mutual insecurities. Spoiler alert – this rages on throughout the book and is not resolved although the friendship deepens further: if you’re reading this series for the romance you’re going to be disappointed. There is at least some progress on the Charlotte front, although I doubt we’ve seen the last of her.
The mystery part was, of course, the main point of the book, and we were well and truly bamboozled by a large cast of potential suspects – many of them wickedly drawn in the various shades of hideous at which Rowling excels. There’s the “Who is Anomie and what do they want?” question, which is what the team are hired to answer, on top of the usual whodunnit, then there’s working out how The Halvening fit in. There are some very clever twists that if spotted early would probably help unlock the puzzle. I was satisfied by the denouement, although my hubby complained that they didn’t actually solve the mystery themselves.
Obviously a big part of this story is the murky online world where Drek’s Game takes place, full of cruelty and hate, sexual perversion and abuse, where the lonely and naive congregate only to be exploited by lurking predators. Galbraith/Rowling is a brave woman to have entered the swamp. Her literary knowledge is extraordinary, but I also love the spiky down to earth wit and humour throughout the book. I don’t know enough to debate what she has or hasn’t said, but have zero respect for all those who have 1-starred this book without even reading it, because they read on Twitter about whatever she is supposed to have said. I personally will be eager to see what she comes up with next.
Leave a Reply