Troubled Blood by Robert GalbraithPublished: September 15, 2020
Genre: Mystery, Fiction
Pages: 944
Synopsis: Private Detective Cormoran Strike is visiting his family in Cornwall when he is approached by a woman asking for help finding her mother, Margot Bamborough — who went missing in mysterious circumstances in 1974.
Strike has never tackled a cold case before, let alone one forty years old. But despite the slim chance of success, he is intrigued and takes it on; adding to the long list of cases that he and his partner in the agency, Robin Ellacott, are currently working on. And Robin herself is also juggling a messy divorce and unwanted male attention, as well as battling her own feelings about Strike.
As Strike and Robin investigate Margot's disappearance, they come up against a fiendishly complex case with leads that include tarot cards, a psychopathic serial killer and witnesses who cannot all be trusted. And they learn that even cases decades old can prove to be deadly...
Thoughts: First off, this book is long. Like, really, overly long. For comparison, the previous book in this series was about 775 pages, whereas this one was about 950. Since I use a Kindle to read these days, I generally have no idea how long a book may be when choosing to read it. Compare that to being able to see how thick an actual physically published book is, I probably would make some different choices in the books I decide to read.
That's not to say there's anything wrong with a long book, if it indeed deserves that length. This book does not, in my opinion. It really starts to drag on in the middle, and honestly made me wonder if the same author had even written it given the repetitive nature of some scenes. The main mystery here, while at times intriguing, was oftentimes convoluted, with many different characters to try to keep track of, which I did not always succeed in doing. Who's Steve Douthwaite compared to Paul Satchwell? I'm still not 100% sure.
Still, the reveal of the mystery was unexpected and one I did not see coming. And, I enjoyed all of the more personal scenes with Strike and Robin -- in particular those featuring Robin. Indeed, the satisfaction those scenes gave really kept me going despite the slog-ish nature of the rest of the book. Seriously, what was the point in making it so much longer than the rest of the books in this series?
I did consider not reading this book because of all of the stuff the author has said about certain things, but it creates this conundrum -- are you not allowed to enjoy things you once did because the person who created them isn't as decent of a person as you had previously thought? It's a tough question, and one that I'm sure many others also struggle with as well. Like, I don't condone that stuff, but I also still want to see what happens next in the story... Sigh. Anyway. There's that.
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