Book Review: The Ink Black Heart, by Robert Galbraith
The sixth Cormoran Strike book, in which bloated is actually better.
Mulholland Books, 2022, 1024 pages
When frantic, dishevelled Edie Ledwell appears in the office begging to speak to her, private detective Robin Ellacott doesn't know quite what to make of the situation. The co-creator of a popular cartoon, The Ink Black Heart, Edie is being persecuted by a mysterious online figure who goes by the pseudonym of Anomie. Edie is desperate to uncover Anomie's true identity.
Robin decides that the agency can't help with this-and thinks nothing more of it until a few days later, when she reads the shocking news that Edie has been tasered and then murdered in Highgate Cemetery, the location of The Ink Black Heart.
Robin and her business partner Cormoran Strike become drawn into the quest to uncover Anomie's true identity. But with a complex web of online aliases, business interests and family conflicts to navigate, Strike and Robin find themselves embroiled in a case that stretches their powers of deduction to the limits-and which threatens them in new and horrifying ways...
Yes, you've heard correctly: The Ink Black Heart is a mystery novel that's over a thousand pages long. J.K. Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith, continues to indulge in the luxury of being an author who probably doesn't get told to cut much; in fact, the first four chapters of this book are about subplots and secondary investigations that have nothing to do with the main plot, which does not arrive until chapter five.
This is the sixth book in the Cormoran Strike series. I expressed misgivings in my last few reviews at the trend it's taking, common to detective series, in which the cast of characters and their interpersonal dramas gets dragged out too long. In this series, of course, the central question since book one has not been who most recently dunit, but whether Cormoran Strike and his pretty personal assistant (now copartner in the firm) Robin Ellacott are going to do it.
But wait! That's not really the big central question hanging over this series, is it? No, it's whether J.K. Rowling is a hateful bigot writing nasty screeds about her critics in the guise of a novel. I thought this criticism reached rather absurd heights with the previous book, Troubled Blood, in which a serial killer in one scene wears a dress to disguise himself as a woman and evade detection. People who never read the book very confidently (and incorrectly) asserted that this was the killer's MO, that the killer was implied to be queer/trans, and that Rowling was clearly writing about the dangers of transwomen. None of this was true. I mean, you can think what you like about Rowling and her views and/or her writing, but I dislike criticism that is driven more by a desire for moral rectitude than accuracy.
So here we are at book six, and by now, predictably much of the online discourse is assertions made in ignorance by people who don't know what they're talking about. Having done what most critics have not, and actually read the book, let's look at what's actually there.
Tweeting like it's 2015
The Ink Black Heart is about a YouTube creator and her toxic fandom, and how a certain subset of the Very Online community is very toxic indeed. Parts of the book are narrated in tweets, chat logs, and Tumblr posts.
Rowling is obviously no stranger to the online world, and she did her research in portraying the communities that enter into the plot. This book was published in 2022, but it's set in 2015, and the online references definitely date to that era. (Funny how nowadays 7 years ago is a "different era" online.) Twitter and Tinder are the hotness, but Tumblr and YouTube have not yet been replaced by TikTok and Snapchat. The online alt-right are still railing against "SJWs" instead of "wokes."
Edie Ledwell and her boyfriend Josh created an animated YouTube series called The Ink Black Heart about... a heart. It's literally a cartoon about disembodied body parts hanging around in a graveyard, with a morbid cast of characters like Heartie, the eponymous heart who tries to be good but is stained by the evil of the person in whose body he once resided. There's also a skeleton, a ghost, a worm, a plague doctor, a host of body parts, and a bunch of other weird characters. Rowling really captured the feeling of these strange online creations that become cult hits that make absolutely no sense to anyone who's not a fan, but are rich in in-jokes and self-referential humor and even poignancy to those who "get it." So a fandom grows around The Ink Black Heart, including a developer who creates a game based on a game that appears in the animation. Along with the fandom grows critics, critics who become even more embittered after Edie and Josh get a Netflix deal and their creation hits the big time.
Edie comes to Cormoran Strike's detective agency and talks to Robin, with a purse full of printed out Tweets, blogs, and nasty emails. She's being attacked online, notably by the creator of the unlicensed game based on her creation, who is one of her biggest critics. She's being harassed and accused of all sorts of things that aren't true, and she wants Robin and Cormoran to find out who the mysterious "Anomie" really is so she can... sue them or something. It's never exactly clear what she thinks she'll do about it once she knows who Anomie is, but Robin regretfully turns her down because the agency has a full client list and anyway, cyber-investigations aren't really their thing.
A few days later, Edie and her ex-boyfriend but still co-creator Josh are both attacked in Highgate Cemetery (which is, incidentally, the setting of The Ink Black Heart cartoon). Edie is stabbed to death, and Josh is severely wounded and hospitalized. The attacker is unknown, as is the reason for Edie and Josh being in the cemetery (except to the reader, who is privy to the modchat discussions in the server devoted to Anomie's game, where we see how they were set up and lured to the cemetery).
So far this is a police investigation, not a matter for private detectives. The rationale that brings Cormoran and Robin onto the case is a bit strained: Josh is understandably traumatized and suddenly balking at the whole media circus around The Ink Black Heart. This is making the suits nervous. Edie's family - only thinking of $$$what's best for Josh (and Edie's legacy)$$$ of course - want Cormoran and Robin to squash a nasty rumor that's been circulating in the fandom, one which apparently Josh was led to believe might be true: that Anomie was Edie, that she was viciously attacking herself online for sympathy and publicity.
Cormoran and Robin aren't technically trying to solve Edie's murder, but of course finding out Anomie's true identity uncovers many other identities and secrets and leads them inevitably to the climactic reveal.
Along the way, they continue to pine for each other while awkwardly avoiding ever actually talking about this like two grown adults, because Rowling sure loves to contrive reasons for characters not to actually talk to each other. Rowling's writing has improved since she moved to adult fiction, but she still has some of her old bad habits from Harry Potter, like relying heavily on contrivances and gimmicks in order to spend many chapters on situations that could be resolved with one conversation.
Is Rowling a mean old TERF lashing out at her critics?
"If a disordered personality finds something that speaks to them on a level they've never experienced before, any criticism from the creator or any change to the work might feel like a personal attack."
So, a creator is killed after her fans turn on her, and there's lots of very accurate representation of toxic online discourse. You can see where this is going, right? OMG JK Rowling is writing about herself and casting herself as the victim!
This is the script I've seen many critics reciting, but it doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Edie Ledwell, the fictional creator and murder victim, might have a few things in common with Rowling (becoming wildly and unexpectedly popular, suddenly having more money than she knows what to do with, and everything she writes being twisted by hostile anti-fans), but the harassment she experiences and the cast of characters around her does not resemble Rowling's situation, and to the degree Rowling might be writing about things that have happened to her, she's also writing about things that happen to basically every blue-checked person online. Except maybe being murdered.
Rowling does drop a few lines here and there that sound like rather pointed authorial throat-clearing:
"You know, this kind of thing is incredibly common when there's a hit. It's usually a case of wishful thinking, or a genuine failure to grasp that similar ideas may come to lots of different people. Amazing how often two films come out at the same time on the same subject. Nobody's stolen anything, you know. It's just there, in the aether."
So yes, she may have taken the opportunity to portray certain segments of fandom in an unflattering way. The thing is, she portrays them in a very true-to-life way. For example, one of Edie's persecutors is an anonymous blogger who writes The Pen of Justice. The Pen of Justice initially appears to be just a bit of background noise in the investigation, one of the many critics who were harassing Edie online, but it's this blogger's attacks (specifically, one throw-away line) that have generated the claims you may have heard that Rowling took off her TERF mask to portray herself as a victim. The Pen of Justice accuses Edie of every imaginable form of bigotry through extremely tortured interpretations of her creation: racism, sexism, classism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and yes, transphobia. There's a worm in The Ink Black Heart, you see, and it's a hermaphrodite because... it's a worm. The Pen of Justice does not find this funny at all. Edie Ledwell is clearly making fun of nonbinary and bisexual people. If that sounds stupid to you, that's the point; the Pen of Justice is a caricature of a certain kind of online social justice activist, but caricature or not, this kind of critic exists, and unsurprisingly, they see themselves in Rowling's portrayal and don't like it.
The actual plot is not primarily about poor Edie and spurious accusations of bigotry. It's about creators, fans, social justice, misogyny, incels and the alt-right, the Very Online, dysfunctional and damaged people, privilege and entitlement, and messy relationships, including those of the protagonists.
The Detective Mystery as a Social Novel
Here is where I will depart from my previous criticisms of Rowling's Cormoran Strike books and say that I really liked The Ink Black Heart - better than I liked the last couple of books in the series - and I liked it because of, not in spite of, its length.
The most common criticism of the Cormoran Strike novels - one I have made myself - is that 1000+ pages is too damn long for a detective novel. Stop being Stephen King, Jo!
Well, you know, as a Stephen King fan also, the bloat for which King is infamous is actually... enjoyable. Yeah, sometimes it meanders far from the plot and lots of his books could tell the same story in half the pages, but we still read all of it, right?
But Rowling's books aren't bloated just because she doesn't know when to cut unnecessary scenes and isn't being edited. I think they're "bloated" because the Cormoran Strike books are only superficially detective novels.
Rowling is a social novelist. She was a social novelist when writing the Harry Potter series (on a narrower and more juvenile scale), and I would argue one of the things that made them captivating is that in that zany, fantastical wizarding world were so many social parables and political allusions that readers saw something of the real world (and often enough, their own lives) in them.
Her first entry into adult fiction was The Casual Vacancy, which was very much in the tradition of British social novels about class and social justice. The Casual Vacancy did well enough, but it didn't have the kind of mass appeal that her first or later series did, because it was, well, a book about petty politics in a small English town. Just the sort of thing that Anthony Trollope or George Eliot would have considered a fine subject for a novel, but it doesn't exactly scream "best-seller" nowadays. I suspect Rowling wrote it to "get it out of her system" (probably was just a story she'd always wanted to write), and then she started writing detective novels with a pair of protagonists ready-made to bring sexual tension into the story, possibly after a talk with her agent. Rowling doesn't need to ever sell a book again, but she clearly likes writing and wants to be read.
But under the cover of this series which I have, with some cynicism, suggested was calculated for saleability, are big sprawling stories about the rich and the poor, about children growing up rough, about victims of violence (particularly women), about celebrity and the soul-bleaching effects of money and fame and privilege, and about very evil people.
As the Cormoran Strike novels wear on, Robin and Cormoran's investigations seem more like macguffins to tell the real story. Book one, The Cuckoo's Calling, was about fame and celebrity, introducing Cormoran as a down-on-his luck detective who happens to be the bastard son of a rock star, and a supermodel murder victim. Book two, The Silkworm, was Rowling teeing off (in a love-hate kind of way) on the publishing world, with a murder victim who was an awful caricature of a Dead White Male author. Book three, Career of Evil, was half crime thriller, with a serial killer mailing body parts, and half romantic drama with Robin's marriage going to hell, not because she secretly wants to shag her boss but it's certainly not helping. Book four, Lethal White, was positively Dickensian in the sense of running from the grimy streets of London to the corridors of Parliament. In book five, Troubled Blood, the mystery was structured as a leisurely year-long cold case investigation so that Cormoran and Robin could track down every last lead, interact with an entire cast of characters and suspects, and also sort out their various interpersonal dramas.
Thus, finally, we come to The Ink Black Heart, which while a little bit more "Of the Moment," being about a YouTube creation and involving a host of online personalities, continues this trend. There are probably two dozen secondary characters, about half of whom are either suspects or red herrings at one point or another, and Robin and Cormoran's quest for the true killer of Edie Ledwell boils down to putting together a bunch of clues together in the final chapter. In the meantime, they have contended with everything from redpilled incels to a white nationalist terrorist group, wealthy magnates with abused children and trophy wives, bohemian stoner fascists, "spoonies" and social justice activists, studio executives, and of course, Robin and Cormoran's respective exes.
If anything, I found the ending underwhelming, because when the real killer was revealed, Rowling had gone to so much effort to throw red herrings and cover the culprit's tracks that I didn't feel like it was a fair test of the reader's mystery-solving abilities. But also I didn't really care because I'd enjoyed the trip.
That said, The Ink Black Heart isn't a perfect book. It is too long. Robin is really starting to read a bit like a wish-fulfillment character, as is Cormoran, the big, rough bloke full of inner vulnerabilities, who's a protective guard dog who'd never actually hurt a woman. I'm sick of his ex Charlotte popping up in every book for another round even though they've been over since book one, and I'm sick of Robin and Cormoran spending six books conveniently avoiding ever having a conversation about Us.
While it's probably my favorite book in the series so far, and I'm down for book seven, I kind of hope Rowling wraps up the series, has Robin and Cormoran ride off into the sunset together like she likes to do in her wish-fulfillment series-enders, and works on something new.
Also by Robert Galbraith: My reviews of The Cuckoo's Calling, The Silkworm, Career of Evil, Lethal White, and Troubled Blood.
My complete list of book reviews.
Mulholland Books, 2022, 1024 pages
When frantic, dishevelled Edie Ledwell appears in the office begging to speak to her, private detective Robin Ellacott doesn't know quite what to make of the situation. The co-creator of a popular cartoon, The Ink Black Heart, Edie is being persecuted by a mysterious online figure who goes by the pseudonym of Anomie. Edie is desperate to uncover Anomie's true identity.
Robin decides that the agency can't help with this-and thinks nothing more of it until a few days later, when she reads the shocking news that Edie has been tasered and then murdered in Highgate Cemetery, the location of The Ink Black Heart.
Robin and her business partner Cormoran Strike become drawn into the quest to uncover Anomie's true identity. But with a complex web of online aliases, business interests and family conflicts to navigate, Strike and Robin find themselves embroiled in a case that stretches their powers of deduction to the limits-and which threatens them in new and horrifying ways...
Yes, you've heard correctly: The Ink Black Heart is a mystery novel that's over a thousand pages long. J.K. Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith, continues to indulge in the luxury of being an author who probably doesn't get told to cut much; in fact, the first four chapters of this book are about subplots and secondary investigations that have nothing to do with the main plot, which does not arrive until chapter five.
This is the sixth book in the Cormoran Strike series. I expressed misgivings in my last few reviews at the trend it's taking, common to detective series, in which the cast of characters and their interpersonal dramas gets dragged out too long. In this series, of course, the central question since book one has not been who most recently dunit, but whether Cormoran Strike and his pretty personal assistant (now copartner in the firm) Robin Ellacott are going to do it.
But wait! That's not really the big central question hanging over this series, is it? No, it's whether J.K. Rowling is a hateful bigot writing nasty screeds about her critics in the guise of a novel. I thought this criticism reached rather absurd heights with the previous book, Troubled Blood, in which a serial killer in one scene wears a dress to disguise himself as a woman and evade detection. People who never read the book very confidently (and incorrectly) asserted that this was the killer's MO, that the killer was implied to be queer/trans, and that Rowling was clearly writing about the dangers of transwomen. None of this was true. I mean, you can think what you like about Rowling and her views and/or her writing, but I dislike criticism that is driven more by a desire for moral rectitude than accuracy.
So here we are at book six, and by now, predictably much of the online discourse is assertions made in ignorance by people who don't know what they're talking about. Having done what most critics have not, and actually read the book, let's look at what's actually there.
Tweeting like it's 2015
The Ink Black Heart is about a YouTube creator and her toxic fandom, and how a certain subset of the Very Online community is very toxic indeed. Parts of the book are narrated in tweets, chat logs, and Tumblr posts.
Rowling is obviously no stranger to the online world, and she did her research in portraying the communities that enter into the plot. This book was published in 2022, but it's set in 2015, and the online references definitely date to that era. (Funny how nowadays 7 years ago is a "different era" online.) Twitter and Tinder are the hotness, but Tumblr and YouTube have not yet been replaced by TikTok and Snapchat. The online alt-right are still railing against "SJWs" instead of "wokes."
Edie Ledwell and her boyfriend Josh created an animated YouTube series called The Ink Black Heart about... a heart. It's literally a cartoon about disembodied body parts hanging around in a graveyard, with a morbid cast of characters like Heartie, the eponymous heart who tries to be good but is stained by the evil of the person in whose body he once resided. There's also a skeleton, a ghost, a worm, a plague doctor, a host of body parts, and a bunch of other weird characters. Rowling really captured the feeling of these strange online creations that become cult hits that make absolutely no sense to anyone who's not a fan, but are rich in in-jokes and self-referential humor and even poignancy to those who "get it." So a fandom grows around The Ink Black Heart, including a developer who creates a game based on a game that appears in the animation. Along with the fandom grows critics, critics who become even more embittered after Edie and Josh get a Netflix deal and their creation hits the big time.
Edie comes to Cormoran Strike's detective agency and talks to Robin, with a purse full of printed out Tweets, blogs, and nasty emails. She's being attacked online, notably by the creator of the unlicensed game based on her creation, who is one of her biggest critics. She's being harassed and accused of all sorts of things that aren't true, and she wants Robin and Cormoran to find out who the mysterious "Anomie" really is so she can... sue them or something. It's never exactly clear what she thinks she'll do about it once she knows who Anomie is, but Robin regretfully turns her down because the agency has a full client list and anyway, cyber-investigations aren't really their thing.
A few days later, Edie and her ex-boyfriend but still co-creator Josh are both attacked in Highgate Cemetery (which is, incidentally, the setting of The Ink Black Heart cartoon). Edie is stabbed to death, and Josh is severely wounded and hospitalized. The attacker is unknown, as is the reason for Edie and Josh being in the cemetery (except to the reader, who is privy to the modchat discussions in the server devoted to Anomie's game, where we see how they were set up and lured to the cemetery).
So far this is a police investigation, not a matter for private detectives. The rationale that brings Cormoran and Robin onto the case is a bit strained: Josh is understandably traumatized and suddenly balking at the whole media circus around The Ink Black Heart. This is making the suits nervous. Edie's family - only thinking of $$$what's best for Josh (and Edie's legacy)$$$ of course - want Cormoran and Robin to squash a nasty rumor that's been circulating in the fandom, one which apparently Josh was led to believe might be true: that Anomie was Edie, that she was viciously attacking herself online for sympathy and publicity.
Cormoran and Robin aren't technically trying to solve Edie's murder, but of course finding out Anomie's true identity uncovers many other identities and secrets and leads them inevitably to the climactic reveal.
Along the way, they continue to pine for each other while awkwardly avoiding ever actually talking about this like two grown adults, because Rowling sure loves to contrive reasons for characters not to actually talk to each other. Rowling's writing has improved since she moved to adult fiction, but she still has some of her old bad habits from Harry Potter, like relying heavily on contrivances and gimmicks in order to spend many chapters on situations that could be resolved with one conversation.
Is Rowling a mean old TERF lashing out at her critics?
"If a disordered personality finds something that speaks to them on a level they've never experienced before, any criticism from the creator or any change to the work might feel like a personal attack."
So, a creator is killed after her fans turn on her, and there's lots of very accurate representation of toxic online discourse. You can see where this is going, right? OMG JK Rowling is writing about herself and casting herself as the victim!
This is the script I've seen many critics reciting, but it doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Edie Ledwell, the fictional creator and murder victim, might have a few things in common with Rowling (becoming wildly and unexpectedly popular, suddenly having more money than she knows what to do with, and everything she writes being twisted by hostile anti-fans), but the harassment she experiences and the cast of characters around her does not resemble Rowling's situation, and to the degree Rowling might be writing about things that have happened to her, she's also writing about things that happen to basically every blue-checked person online. Except maybe being murdered.
Rowling does drop a few lines here and there that sound like rather pointed authorial throat-clearing:
"You know, this kind of thing is incredibly common when there's a hit. It's usually a case of wishful thinking, or a genuine failure to grasp that similar ideas may come to lots of different people. Amazing how often two films come out at the same time on the same subject. Nobody's stolen anything, you know. It's just there, in the aether."
So yes, she may have taken the opportunity to portray certain segments of fandom in an unflattering way. The thing is, she portrays them in a very true-to-life way. For example, one of Edie's persecutors is an anonymous blogger who writes The Pen of Justice. The Pen of Justice initially appears to be just a bit of background noise in the investigation, one of the many critics who were harassing Edie online, but it's this blogger's attacks (specifically, one throw-away line) that have generated the claims you may have heard that Rowling took off her TERF mask to portray herself as a victim. The Pen of Justice accuses Edie of every imaginable form of bigotry through extremely tortured interpretations of her creation: racism, sexism, classism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and yes, transphobia. There's a worm in The Ink Black Heart, you see, and it's a hermaphrodite because... it's a worm. The Pen of Justice does not find this funny at all. Edie Ledwell is clearly making fun of nonbinary and bisexual people. If that sounds stupid to you, that's the point; the Pen of Justice is a caricature of a certain kind of online social justice activist, but caricature or not, this kind of critic exists, and unsurprisingly, they see themselves in Rowling's portrayal and don't like it.
The actual plot is not primarily about poor Edie and spurious accusations of bigotry. It's about creators, fans, social justice, misogyny, incels and the alt-right, the Very Online, dysfunctional and damaged people, privilege and entitlement, and messy relationships, including those of the protagonists.
The Detective Mystery as a Social Novel
Here is where I will depart from my previous criticisms of Rowling's Cormoran Strike books and say that I really liked The Ink Black Heart - better than I liked the last couple of books in the series - and I liked it because of, not in spite of, its length.
The most common criticism of the Cormoran Strike novels - one I have made myself - is that 1000+ pages is too damn long for a detective novel. Stop being Stephen King, Jo!
Well, you know, as a Stephen King fan also, the bloat for which King is infamous is actually... enjoyable. Yeah, sometimes it meanders far from the plot and lots of his books could tell the same story in half the pages, but we still read all of it, right?
But Rowling's books aren't bloated just because she doesn't know when to cut unnecessary scenes and isn't being edited. I think they're "bloated" because the Cormoran Strike books are only superficially detective novels.
Rowling is a social novelist. She was a social novelist when writing the Harry Potter series (on a narrower and more juvenile scale), and I would argue one of the things that made them captivating is that in that zany, fantastical wizarding world were so many social parables and political allusions that readers saw something of the real world (and often enough, their own lives) in them.
Her first entry into adult fiction was The Casual Vacancy, which was very much in the tradition of British social novels about class and social justice. The Casual Vacancy did well enough, but it didn't have the kind of mass appeal that her first or later series did, because it was, well, a book about petty politics in a small English town. Just the sort of thing that Anthony Trollope or George Eliot would have considered a fine subject for a novel, but it doesn't exactly scream "best-seller" nowadays. I suspect Rowling wrote it to "get it out of her system" (probably was just a story she'd always wanted to write), and then she started writing detective novels with a pair of protagonists ready-made to bring sexual tension into the story, possibly after a talk with her agent. Rowling doesn't need to ever sell a book again, but she clearly likes writing and wants to be read.
But under the cover of this series which I have, with some cynicism, suggested was calculated for saleability, are big sprawling stories about the rich and the poor, about children growing up rough, about victims of violence (particularly women), about celebrity and the soul-bleaching effects of money and fame and privilege, and about very evil people.
As the Cormoran Strike novels wear on, Robin and Cormoran's investigations seem more like macguffins to tell the real story. Book one, The Cuckoo's Calling, was about fame and celebrity, introducing Cormoran as a down-on-his luck detective who happens to be the bastard son of a rock star, and a supermodel murder victim. Book two, The Silkworm, was Rowling teeing off (in a love-hate kind of way) on the publishing world, with a murder victim who was an awful caricature of a Dead White Male author. Book three, Career of Evil, was half crime thriller, with a serial killer mailing body parts, and half romantic drama with Robin's marriage going to hell, not because she secretly wants to shag her boss but it's certainly not helping. Book four, Lethal White, was positively Dickensian in the sense of running from the grimy streets of London to the corridors of Parliament. In book five, Troubled Blood, the mystery was structured as a leisurely year-long cold case investigation so that Cormoran and Robin could track down every last lead, interact with an entire cast of characters and suspects, and also sort out their various interpersonal dramas.
Thus, finally, we come to The Ink Black Heart, which while a little bit more "Of the Moment," being about a YouTube creation and involving a host of online personalities, continues this trend. There are probably two dozen secondary characters, about half of whom are either suspects or red herrings at one point or another, and Robin and Cormoran's quest for the true killer of Edie Ledwell boils down to putting together a bunch of clues together in the final chapter. In the meantime, they have contended with everything from redpilled incels to a white nationalist terrorist group, wealthy magnates with abused children and trophy wives, bohemian stoner fascists, "spoonies" and social justice activists, studio executives, and of course, Robin and Cormoran's respective exes.
If anything, I found the ending underwhelming, because when the real killer was revealed, Rowling had gone to so much effort to throw red herrings and cover the culprit's tracks that I didn't feel like it was a fair test of the reader's mystery-solving abilities. But also I didn't really care because I'd enjoyed the trip.
That said, The Ink Black Heart isn't a perfect book. It is too long. Robin is really starting to read a bit like a wish-fulfillment character, as is Cormoran, the big, rough bloke full of inner vulnerabilities, who's a protective guard dog who'd never actually hurt a woman. I'm sick of his ex Charlotte popping up in every book for another round even though they've been over since book one, and I'm sick of Robin and Cormoran spending six books conveniently avoiding ever having a conversation about Us.
While it's probably my favorite book in the series so far, and I'm down for book seven, I kind of hope Rowling wraps up the series, has Robin and Cormoran ride off into the sunset together like she likes to do in her wish-fulfillment series-enders, and works on something new.
Also by Robert Galbraith: My reviews of The Cuckoo's Calling, The Silkworm, Career of Evil, Lethal White, and Troubled Blood.
My complete list of book reviews.