“I seen a kid killed…He strangled it, up by the horse.”
When Billy, a troubled young man, comes to private eye Cormoran Strike’s office to ask for his help investigating a crime he thinks he witnessed as a child, Strike is left deeply unsettled. While Billy is obviously mentally distressed, and cannot remember many concrete details, there is something sincere about him and his story. But before Strike can question him further, Billy bolts from his office in a panic.
Trying to get to the bottom of Billy’s story, Strike and Robin Ellacott—once his assistant, now a partner in the agency—set off on a twisting trail that leads them through the backstreets of London, into a secretive inner sanctum within Parliament, and to a beautiful but sinister manor house deep in the countryside.
And during this labyrinthine investigation, Strike’s own life is far from straightforward: his newfound fame as a private eye means he can no longer operate behind the scenes as he once did. Plus, his relationship with his former assistant is more fraught than it ever has been—Robin is now invaluable to Strike in the business, but their personal relationship is much, much trickier than that.
The amount of times my mind suddenly interrupts my reading of a book to say “this is is amazing, I want to find out what happens yet…I don’t want it to be over” is directly proportional to how good the book is. I read Lethal White on vacation, in one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, and yet I still feverishly tapped for the next page on my phone, still paused repeatedly to wish that I could simultaneously find out what happened now and yet also never stop reading this book. Yes, it’s that addicting. Before we go further, please be advised that this review will be full of spoilers so please stop here if you don’t want to be spoiled. (I highly recommend reading this book unspoiled!)
Lethal White picks up where we left off in Career of Evil, Robin marrying the odious Matthew while Strike shows up, bleeding and disheveled, to beg her to take her job back. For those of you like me, who shrieked when Career of Evil ended on this, well, evil cliffhanger, be assured that there isn’t a time skip to start off this book, and instead we see the fallout of everyone’s actions from Career of Evil in all of their dirty glory. Robin finally tears into Matthew like I’ve been waiting for and our detectives are reunited in business, if not in anything else.
Our partners are now back at work, but there’s a bit of a distance between them now, born of mutual awkward feelings neither is sure is appropriate or reciprocated. Now here’s where we get our time jump of one year, when Billy, the aforementioned troubled young man, appears in the office. Billy seems like a case of a person with mental illness talking about an imagined horror, but something gives Strike, and the readers, pause. He seems troubled, but does that exclude Billy from a mental illness, and from seeing someone get strangled? Strike investigates, and this brings him into the sights of Jasper Chiswell, the Minister for Culture. Chiswell’s being blackmailed by more than one person, but refuses to say over what, or why. Robin, Strike, and some fun new additions to the detective team are led down a rabbit hole of seemingly unconnected events and people, weird coincidences and sketchy dealings. How they intersect in the end was marvelous, and I enjoyed the few scraps I figured out on my own along the way leading up to the big reveal. While I wasn’t astounded at the culprit behind it all, to me the point of these books is more how we got there; the detective work and the revelations, versus a whodunnit. That, and the fascinating interpersonal relationships in Strike and Robin’s lives.
I won’t lie, I wanted to shake Robin when she stays with Matthew after what he’s done, deleting her call records and the past cheating on her when she was recovering from a rape, but based on how people often behave in reality, it’s very believable that she stays with him. I didn’t think I could detest Matthew more than I had previously, but J.K. Rowling (Robert Galbraith) has outdone herself. Even the description of how Matthew’s skin tightened when he’s angry annoyed me, and thank god Robin left him mid book after finding out about the second infidelity, or I might’ve torn out some hair. In regards to Strike/Robin as a couple, as much as I love the idea of it, if the relationship happens, a lot of our delicious conflict ends, a la the Mulder and Scully/Jim and Pam effect. So while I root for Strike and Robin to end up together, I also root for them to keep not telling each other their true feelings, to prolong our delicious agony of waiting.
I also enjoyed how much of the information in this book was a giant red herring. There were all sorts of suspicious behavior, dark family secrets, and illegal dealings that only touched on relevancy. (Rhiannon Winn, for one.) However, the writing was so excellent that I finished the book wanting to know more about these red herrings and the people and plot threads that didn’t actually matter as much to the mystery. (What happened to Della, Flick, and Aamir??)
All I know is that I was dying to read the next book ten seconds after I finished this one, and find out the next wild mystery to solve, while rooting for Robin and Strike’s happiness.
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