Too Much Will They, Won't They

[mtvessel]

Sep 2022
Troubled Blood – Robert Galbraith – Sphere Books, 2020
* * *
This novel sees Strike and Robin take on a standard rite of passage in detective fiction, the cold case. While visiting his sick aunt in Cornwall, Strike is approached by Anna, a woman who wants him to investigate the disappearance of her mother Margot, a London GP, forty years previously. The police think that she was abducted by a now-incarcerated serial killer, Dennis Creed, as she walked from work to see a friend, but he is refusing to say. And there are other suspects and witnesses; the staff at Margot's GP surgery, her husband Roy, who married Anna's nanny suspiciously soon after Margot was declared dead, and an obsessive patient called Steve.

The case itself is fine and has a satisfying resolution, but as in Lethal White, its progress is sandwiched between big dollops of the soap opera of Strike's and Robin's personal lives and their increasingly tedious romantic tension, fatally weakening the pacing. This means that the books are becoming ever more unwieldy – this one is over 900 pages. As, I note, is the next. At least with the Potter series there was a fixed ending. I think it may be time to get off this particular train.