By any name, author strikes the right mark
After three long years, the new Cormoran Strike novel is finally here. Yet fans of J.K. Rowling’s (writing as Robert Galbraith) prickly private detective will require a little more patience before getting their crime kicks. At 656 pages, Lethal White is easily the longest in the series. It is a big, busy and complicated book, with Rowling unafraid to take her time building up the cluttered cast and interconnected plotlines.
The story picks up one year after the events of the previous novel. It’s 2012, a few weeks before the London Olympics. Strike’s struggling to cope with too much attention but not enough money; Robin is juggling PTSD with her loveless marriage. Things get interesting when a man living with mental health issues, Billy Knight, arrives at Strike’s office, demanding he investigate a strangulation he claims to have witnessed as a child.
Billy flees before giving clear clues but piques Strike’s interest. His attempt to track Billy down leads Strike to Minister for Culture Jasper Chiswell, who reveals he is victim of a complicated blackmail plot.
The story quickly brews into a clash of cultures, with Strike and Robin entering a murky world of politics, protestors and the upper classes.
Things move slowly at first but when a murder finally occurs around the halfway mark, the pace mercifully picks up. Rowling deftly weaves the various plotlines together, knitting together a gripping thriller that quickly transforms from glacial bore to addictive page-turner.
She excels when digging into the mysteries of her carefully constructed plots, which makes it baffling that she spends so long focusing on her characters’ love lives.
Strike and Robin’s relationship was once platonic and ambiguous but in a prelude set at Robin’s wedding, Rowling makes it clear there is an unspoken mutual attraction.
The plotline adds little to the novel, simply killing the momentum whenever it is brought up. Yet romance plays a larger role here than in any of previous instalments despite ultimately being forgotten when the crime takes focus. Strangely, almost every female character we meet in Lethal White shows an attraction towards Strike, despite his unattractiveness being regularly brought up.
Rowling may still be using her pseudonym, but that doesn’t excuse the novel’s distracting male gaze.
We are here for thrills, after all, and Strike and Robin are far more interesting as detectives than they are romantics. The central crime sometimes struggles under the weight of so many moving pieces, but Lethal White is an inventive, imaginative and unpredictable thriller that, once it finally gets going, proves impossible to put down.