Add Category
FICTION
The Running Grave
Robert Galbraith
Little, Brown, $34.99
Under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, J.K. Rowling has now produced seven increasingly hefty crime novels in 10 years, all featuring private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott. Last year’s instalment, The Ink Black Heart, got mixed reviews mainly because of the lengthy back-channel conversations held by a group of moderators running a cult-level online game, and the study of a religious cult in this new novel follows on from the premise of the previous one.
Robert Galbraith’s books have been adapted for screen, with Tom Burke as Cormoran Strike and Holliday Grainger as Robin Ellacott.Credit:
Both books show how quickly and easily you can brainwash otherwise quite normal people if you go about it the right way, offering them someone to worship while creating a subculture that quickly becomes the most important thing in their lives.
In The Running Grave, Strike and Robin are hired by a worried father to extract his grown son from a religious community in rural Norfolk, part of something called the Universal Humanitarian Church, and they decide that Robin should go undercover to infiltrate the group and find some way to discredit and expose it.
This exercise turns out to be both more prolonged and more dangerous than either of them could have imagined, and the cult is disturbingly reminiscent of many real-life stories we know, from the worst excesses of the Pentecostal church or the Trump-led attack on the Capitol in Washington, through to Islamic State on the one hand, and Charles Manson’s The Family on the other.
There is the usual rich Galbraithian background of subplots and sub-subplots. Both detectives experience new family developments and bumpy passages in their love lives, while silently yearning for each other. More than one character comes to a nasty end, not always deserved.
Each member of the secondary cast, particularly Strike and Robin’s families, and the agency’s other employees, is developed with the astonishing skill at characterisation that Rowling has been demonstrating since 1997, on the first page of the first Harry Potter book.
The Strike series has all the satisfactions of the crime genre’s conventions, not least of which is the war on evil being fought by characters who are themselves imperfect but basically good. Conclusions are reached, puzzles are solved, secrets are revealed, bad guys get their comeuppance, and in between these weighty considerations there are many very funny bits of dialogue, as well as the slow-burning romance.