Review of TROUBLED BLOOD by Robert Galbraith

 3 Stars

This is the fifth Cormoran Strike novel.  The investigation, this time, is a 40-year-old cold case.

In 1974, Dr. Margot Bamborough left her clinic and was never seen again.  The initial police investigation was led by a man who was shortly thereafter hospitalized because of mental illness; his successor had no success in determining what happened to the doctor.  In 2014, the doctor’s daughter hires Strike and his partner, Robin Ellacott, to find out what happened to her mother.

The police had focused on Dennis Creed, a notorious serial killer who had been abducting, torturing and killing his female victims in the vicinity of Bamborough’s disappearance.  In the course of the investigation, other suspects emerge:  among others, there’s a vicious gangster and a patient whose girlfriends tended to end up dead. 

Besides the cold case, the novel also focuses on Strike’s relationship with his father and his visits to his aunt/surrogate mother who has been diagnosed with cancer, Robin’s divorce, and the mutual attraction between Robin and Strike. 

At over 900 pages, this book is a doorstopper.  I found it becoming tedious for a number of reasons.  The interrogation scenes with witnesses or children of witnesses went on and on.  Of course, some witnesses are missing and memories are faulty.  Then there are the lies and misdirections.  The reader is given so much information with so many red herrings that it is virtually impossible to solve the case.  Astrology was an obsession of the lead police investigator, and Robin and Strike’s discussions of the subject also go on and on.  In addition, each chapter begins with a quotation, sometimes fairly long, from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen; after a while I just gave up trying to figure out the relevance to each chapter.  It is difficult to maintain suspense in a lengthy tome, so some judicious editing would have been appropriate. 

I re-read my review of Lethal White, the previous book in the series, and found that many of my comments could be applied to Troubled Blood:  “This is a lengthy book with lots of twists and turns and red herrings.  The plot is so complex with so many details that the reader will be at a loss to tie together all the information into a coherent whole” and “There are some predictable elements.  . . .  the women with whom Strike has liaisons cause problems for Strike and confusion for Robin.  And there are the inevitable conversations where Strike and Robin talk at cross purposes and fail to understand each other” and “Though this can be read as a standalone novel, it is best read as part of the series since the Strike and Robin relationship has developed over time.  This book, more than the others, focuses on the unacknowledged romantic tension between the two.”

I would not call this a page-turner.  To the first three books in the series (The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm, and Career of Evil) I awarded 4 Stars; the fourth book Lethal White received 3.5 Stars; and this one gets only 3 Stars.  There’s an unfortunate trend here.

Here are links to my reviews of the other books in the series:

https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2015/10/reviews-of-cuckoos-calling-and-silkworm.html

https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2015/10/review-of-career-of-evil-by-robert.html

https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2018/10/review-of-lethal-white-by-robert.html