A fresh mystery ‘to look forward to’
Duo’s developing relationship anchors third in satisfying series
Perhaps now that we have gotten over our shock that J.K. Rowling is writing mystery novels as Robert Galbraith, we can finally focus on just how good she is at it. As an acquaintance said earlier this week, when I mentioned I was about to read Career of Evil, the third novel in Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike series, “I look forward to the Galbraith books the way I used to look forward to a new Rebus.” Rightly so.
Career of Evil opens with private investigator Cormoran Strike and his co-worker Robin Ellacott riding high from their successes, documented in the previous two novels. There’s money in the bank, a solid number of clients, and their high public profile signals an end to the agency’s hardscrabble early days.
That all changes when a woman’s severed leg is delivered to the agency. When the media gets hold of the story, clients start to disappear, and their funds are quickly depleted. More importantly, though: the package was addressed to Robin personally. Someone, it becomes clear, is hunting the young woman, looking to destroy both her and Strike and everything they have built.
Based on clues accompanying the severed limb, including lyrics to a Blue Oyster Cult song which has a disturbing link to Strike’s personal history, the detectives pursue three figures from Strike’s past, both personal and from his former career as a military investigator, who have motive and are the types of personalities to enact such a grisly plan.
As Robin and Strike draw together strands of the past and present, Galbraith demonstrates a breezy command of the intricacies of both the central mystery and of the form itself. It’s a genuine — and all-too-rare — pleasure to see a mystery cracked through dogged investigative work, without reliance on coincidence or sudden leaps of logic. The reveal of the killer is carefully supported: nothing comes out of left field, and the clues are all there, lurking in plain sight.
As satisfying as the mystery is, however, Galbraith’s great strength is the ongoing development of the relationship between Strike and Robin. Using the case, so rooted in the past, as a catalyst, Galbraith explores the histories of both characters, and shows the full effect of the past on the present. Strike and Robin are as powerful a fictional pairing as any in recent memory. Their relationship which Galbraith has allowed to unfold naturally and shift over the course of three novels, is the true heart of these books. Robert Wiersema’s latest book is Black Feathers.