Library Limelights 233

 

Robert Galbraith. Troubled Blood. Large Print. USA: Mulholland Books/ Little, Brown and Company/ Hachette Book Group, 2020. (1,485 pp.)

Ah, this is more like it. JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike strikes again. After four previous novels in the series, he has achieved some celebrity as a PI; he and partner Robin Ellacot have about a half dozen cases on the go with sub-contractors, mostly ex-cops, working for them. Strike is intermittently back and forth to Cornwall where his beloved Aunt Joan is dying. Robin is either furious or depressed at the stalemate in her divorce from Matthew. Both Strike and Robin love their business, their jobs, and studiously avoid their mutual personal feelings. A cold case from forty years ago is the detectives’ main challenge here. Dr. Margot Bamborough walked out of her London clinic one evening never to be seen again. Her daughter Anna, a baby at the time, hires Strike and Robin and company on a one-year contract in the faint hope of learning her mother’s fate.

In a novel this size—large print or not―dozens and dozens of characters and conversations fill the pages. It took me almost a week just to reach halfway, enjoying every moment; you never want it to end. First and foremost among suspects is Dennis Creed, a convicted and imprisoned serial killer of women, a man who refuses to say if Margot was one of his victims. Strike and Robin painstakingly review police reports and each of Margot’s still-living contacts. Suspicions soon arise about the medical practice, its patients, and its neighbourhood. Janice, the nurse; Irene, the blowhard receptionist; Brenner the addicted doctor colleague; the mysterious Theo, last patient to see Margot. Then there’s her hematologist husband, Roy Phipps and his current wife Cynthia, once nanny to the baby Anna; Margot’s old boyfriend Paul Satchwell on the scene; the sinister strangers glimpsed at a clinic office party; undercurrents everywhere add to Margot’s story and her last walk. As Strike and Robin strip away the superficial, few of these people are what they first seemed.

Into the mix are the astrological musings of the first investigating police officer, who was descending into a form of madness, whose frantic diagrams are baffling. But life goes on inside and outside Strike’s office. Robin dodges the unwanted attentions of Morris, their sleazy subcontractor, and her lawyer’s recommendation for divorce mediation. Strike is plagued by unwanted attentions from suicidal ex-girlfriend Charlotte and his estranged musician father, Rokeby. His buddy Dave Polworth saves the day on one fraught trip to Cornwall. Throughout are delightful chapter parallels from Spenser’s The Faerie Queen—genius! My guess at Margot’s fate was way off base, reinforcing the author’s adroit skills in my humble opinion. Galbraith/Rowling is superb at nuance even in a sprawling plot such as this. Are Robin and Strike willing to go on same as ever? A dram of sweete is worth a pound of sowre ...

One-liners

▪ Every married person he knew seemed desperate to chivvy others into matrimony, no matter how poor an advertisement they themselves were for the institution. (14)

▪ “Inspector Talbot told me at the start of my own police interview that Roy had been completely ruled out of their inquiries—which I’ve always thought was an odd thing to tell me.” (166)

▪ Birthdays were inextricably linked with the knowledge, which had long since become part of him, that his existence was accidental, that his genetic inheritance had been tested in court, and that the birth itself had been “fucking hideous, darling, if men had to do it the human race would be extinct in a year.” (312)

▪ They were friends, and he hoped they’d always be friends, and he suspected the best way to guarantee that was never see each other naked. (387)

▪ Calling himself a dickhead was the most likeable thing she’d ever known Morris do. (538)

▪ A corpse, however unwelcome, meant anguish could find both expression and sublimation among flowers, speeches and ritual, consolation drawn from God, alcohol and fellow mourners; an apotheosis reached, a first step taken toward grasping the awful fact that life was extinct, and life must go on. (651)

▪ The women most readily drawn to Strike were, in Polworth’s view, neurotic, chaotic and occasionally dangerous, and their fondness for the bent-nosed ex-boxer indicated a subconscious desire for something rocklike to which they could attach themselves like limpets. (1009)

▪ They were alone in the office for the first time since the night Strike had given her two black eyes. (1305)

▪ Creed’s secrets were the only power he had left, and Strike was well aware that persuading him to relinquish any of them might prove a task beyond any human investigator. (1350)

Multi-liners

▪ “Irene, the blonde receptionist, told the police that Margot received two threatening, anonymous notes shortly before she disappeared. They’re not in the police file, so we’ve only got Irene’s statement to go on.” (198)

▪ “Single mother, trying to cope with us all on ‘er own. It’s merciful,” said Satchwell, “putting someone out of their misery. A mercy.” (902)

▪ If only she could come inside his head and see what was there, Strike thought, she’d understand that she occupied a unique place in his thoughts and in his affections. He felt he owed her that information, but was afraid that saying it might move this conversation into territory from which it would be difficult to retreat. (1163)

▪ “I knew you were a bloody cheat and a liar, but three girlfriends dead? One’s a tragedy,” said Donna furiously, and Strike wondered whether they were about to hear a Wildean epigram, “but three? How bloody unlucky can one man get?” (1277)

▪ “—he’s a classic sociopath, you see, a pure example of the type. He scores very highly on the dark triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Devious, sadistic, unrepentant and extremely egotistical.” (1354)

Holy hiding:

“Churches are good cover for killers,” said Strike. “Sex offenders, too.”

“Priests and doctors,” said Robin thoughtfully. “It’s hardwired in most of us to trust them, don’t you think?”

“After the Catholic Church’s many scandals? After Harold Shipman?”

“Yes, I think so,” said Robin. “Don’t you think we tend to invest some categories of people with unearned goodness? I suppose we’ve all got a need to trust people who seem to have power over life and death.”

“Think you’re onto something there,” said Strike, as they entered a short pedestrian lane called Jerusalem Passage. (205-6)

Robin finds Joni Mitchell:

But in the darkness, really listening, she began to hear melodies among the suspended chords, and as she stopped comparing the music to anything she would usually have listened to, she realized that the images she had found alienating in their strangeness were confessions of inadequacy and displacement, of the difficulty of merging two lives, of waiting for the soulmate who never arrived, of craving both freedom and love.

It was with a literal start that she heard the words at the beginning of track eight, “I’m always running behind the times, just like this train ...”

And when, later in the song, Mitchell asked: “what are you going to do now? You got no one to give your love to,” tears started in Robin’s eyes. (525-6)

Elephant in the room:

And with the mention of Creed, faces of the three women on the sofa fell. His very name seemed to conjure a kind of black hole in the room, into which living women had disappeared, never to be seen again; a manifestation of almost supernatural evil. There was a finality in the very mention of him: the monster, now locked away for life, untouchable, unreachable, like the women locked up and tortured in his basement. (685)

Magic in stars:

The astrological notes were starting to tangle themselves around his thought processes, like an old net snagged in a propellor. A pernicious mixture of sense and nonsense, they mirrored, in Strike’s opinion, the appeal of astrology itself, with its flattering, comforting promise that your petty concerns were of interest to the wide universe, and that the stars or the spirit world would guide you where your own hard work and reason couldn’t. (708)

Jüssi Adler-Olsen. Victim 2117. Ebook download from Toronto Public Library. UK: Quercus Publishing, 2019.

Adler-Olsen began veering away from purely crime-solving when Department Q’s Rose went off the rails in a prior novel. She’s back, seemingly to normal, providing the only stable point for Carl Mørck’s Copenhagen police department. With Rose’s assistance, Gordon is dealing by telephone with a crazed young gamer, Alexander, planning to kill a lot of people at random, starting with his parents. That is relatively straightforward compared with Assad’s and Carl’s trials in Germany. In fact Assad is the main target of personal revenge in an elaborately concocted scheme devised by the dastardly Ghaalib—who has held Assad’s wife and daughters hostage for sixteen years, we learn (as does Assad, to his shock). Along the way, Ghaalib also plans to blow up a great many innocent people in Berlin.

Backtracking sixteen years to interaction between the two enemies, in no particular chronological order, was off-putting. Syrian refugees on a Mediterranean beach start the backstory; Assad recognizes a dead woman among them. We meet the gloating Ghaalib’s trusted enforcer Hamid; terrified women; a terminally-ill sniper; torture in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison; a bevy of wheelchairs; a migrant camp on Cyprus; paralyzing drugs—yes, a bit disjointed. Inserting the inane journalist Joan (Spanish, male) into the mix is an irritating device. Granted, there is a breathless climax in Berlin with shooting galore from every corner of a precisely described park. Yet Assad, the once invincible soldier, spends a lot of his time in helpless tears. Everyone cries; except Alexander, back in Copenhagen, who says implausibly that he’s avenging the dead woman on the beach.

Not only the very intricate terrorist plot is farfetched—even for dedicated terrorists―a lot of the language and dialogue are ambiguous or confusing, and it’s not due to translation. Who did what to whom is a bit muddled. What previously was quirkiness in both humour and characters now often comes across as cartoon-ish. How on earth can Rose call Assad her chocolate man?! In my considered experience, Arabs do not have distinctly brown skin. How can the chief plotter have the remote control for a bomb in one hand, an Uzi in the other, yet manage to pull out his cell phone for a conversation? Too many unlikely such details. IMO Victim 2117 tries too hard in all ways.

Bits and Pieces

▪ “But why did you faint, Assad? Is there anything wrong?” (131)

▪ The girls cried and screamed, but they soon stopped when their mother was beaten every time they opened their mouths. (235)

▪ “It’s too much,” he had said. “Even a camel has to sink to its knees once in a while and seek rest.” (251)

▪ They wanted articles at the newspaper, and people all over the world read what he had written because he had become a key link in the hunt for a very dangerous man. Victim 2117’s murderer! (271)

▪ Joan was scared, of course, but when he was paralyzed, it affected everything inside him and he became defeatist, indifferent, and passive. (454)

▪ “You can’t go off on your own on this, Assad.” (626)

▪ “Chin up, Gordon. You know what they say: When you’re up to your neck in shit, don’t hang your head.” (667)

Say Again?

▪ It was always difficult to be confronted with anxiety that could not be tamed. (192)

▪ One of the museum’s inner courtyards was adorned with a fountain figure, which required you to squint your eyes in order to understand its beauty. (207)

▪ It was only now that it sank in for Carl that Assad was standing on the verge between human and killing machine. (381)

▪ Assad shrugged. “A camel always has its water in its hump, and I have my homemade master key stuck right under my massive new watch.” (390)

▪ Ghaalid was the ideal mastermind in any guerilla war, and that was also how he wished to be known. (505)

▪ “All the indifference and animosity he has experienced and exhibits himself to other individuals, he uses as a sort of weapon when he chooses to punish a boundless and great indifference: the one humanity itself is guilty of.” (549)

▪ He was a hero, they said. So how could he also be the opposite at the same time? (765)