The Weakest One

I've been gradually reading the Strike/Ellacott novels by JK Rowling. The first of these was good but fell apart in the final chapter, while the others have been generally solid, and there have been a couple of really good ones in there. Unfortunately, "The Hallmarked Man" is not one of these.

The eighth book in the series, THM runs to 1050 pages, and could have done with being about 30% shorter. There's too much repetition in the "relationship" chapters of the book, while simultaneously not really moving much of anything forward except right at the very end. Meanwhile, the investigation is long and meandering, where the main problem is not "whodunnit", but rather who was it dun to - once that is clear, everything else falls into place.

But, alas, I clocked the eventual killer pretty much right away. I still didn't quite see why, or even how, but the who was pretty clear.

Unfortunately, along with the repetition in the "relationship" chapters, there was a lot of repetition in motifs for the series - there was another rival investigation company, there was another subcontractor causing trouble, there was a redux of Strike's disastrous relationship from the previous book, and there was a repeated mannerism that gave away the killer. Hopefully the remaining two novels in the series will offer something new, because otherwise this could prove to be a problem.

(I do wonder which way the next novel will go: will she do the "Empire Strikes Back" ending, where everything goes wrong before coming together for an eventual mega-happy ending, or will she end with our heroes seemingly happy, only for the final book to see Strike die some senseless, heroic death? (With Robin somehow miraculously pregnant with his child in order to provide the seed of future happiness...))

Anyway, that's a shame. On the other hand, there was a book I really didn't want to cite as my weakest book of the year, and that's now been escaped. So I guess that's something!

#25: "The Hallmarked Man", by Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling)