She was accused of being a TERF (Google it, I am not explaining) when her last book Troubled Blood, a few tweets and a blog post came out. FYI, Robert Galbraith is JK Rowling (Harry Potter's mom) and that's why I'm going with the she/her/herself thing. That book was a decent one that could keep me engaged for all 950 pages on a weekend of binge. When you consider all the vitriol that was splashed her way by the militant leftists and liberals at that time, you may have thought she will change the tone of the next book.
Well change she did, she went all guns blazing at all kinds of -ism/phobia people on both right and left this time. There are ultra right nuts, people who say ‘you feel guilty of not achieving anything due to internalised capitalism’ and everything in between. The book had subtly shitted on all tropes so much that none of them can actually call her out without giving their opponents some limelight. A truly neutral book.
So with that out of the way, the book ‘Ink Black Heart’ is a good read. It is not Agatha Christie level work, but not a trash paperback either. You can resign to your couch, grab around 8-10 packs of chips and go through it (the book, not the chips) in around 4-5 days (~1000 pages). The book begins with the weird sexual tension between the one legged detective Cormoran Strike and his very abled, extremely attractive partner Robin. It’s weird that over the last six books or so everyone reading was screaming ‘get get a damn room’ to these people, but neither of them got any wiser. We then get introduced to their team, it has grown a bit since the last time we met the agency. The business is booming and our heroes are in a good shape (except Strike, having his leg blown up and all. Duh)
Our detectives gets to business and find themselves a bit handicapped (no pun intended) when they identify that most of the investigation will have to be done online and they are not the best of the cyber sleuths in London. But then Strike isn't someone who steps back (lol) from a challenge. He throws a couple punches, gets a new girlfriend, drinks a lot of Doom bars while having a (mental) romantic relation with his partner while Robin does some interesting bit of investigation in between fawning over Strike. Kiss already, you two and get it over with. This is getting really annoying.
The second and third storylines follow other investigations that the agency had to juggle with while the major partners dabble in a bit of cyber stalking, actual stalking and lots of interviews and speculations.
This book, at least in my opinion, is the one where Robin outshines Strike in every means. She makes almost all the critical breakthroughs, she leads the way when none could be found and she clearly proves her mettle. By the end (I hope) she even realized that there are many more fishes in the sea other than a certain burly smoker. The suspects, the witness and others we meet are clear caricatures of various peacocks we see these days online and annoyingly in real life. Strike being a middle aged grumpy man clearly shows admirable restraint by not choking multiple of them and the reader could feel his unexpressed pain and rage !
So should I read this book?
There is a bit of technical and millennial / post millennial newspeak that I had to google a couple times and I think the book will be more interesting to someone who is familiar with the current pop culture and social media.
Tail end: I hate grading a book as I feel it's an injustice to the author who spent a year to write it while a semi-literate moron could simply put a score for it, but here we go, 3.5/5
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