Book Review: The Running Grave, by Robert Galbraith
In the seventh book in the Cormoran Strike series, Cormoran and Robin investigate a cult.
Mulholland Books, 2023, 960 pages
In the seventh installment in the Strike series, Cormoran and Robin must rescue a man ensnared in the trap of a dangerous cult.
Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside.
The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organization that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths.
In order to try to rescue Will, Strike's business partner, Robin Ellacott, decides to infiltrate the cult, and she travels to Norfolk to live incognito among its members. But in doing so, she is unprepared for the dangers that await her there or for the toll it will take on her. . .
Utterly pulse-pounding, The Running Grave moves Strike's and Robin's story forward in this epic, unforgettable seventh installment of the series.
I've complained before about the wordiness of the Cormoran Strike novels, but also admitted I kind of enjoyed them. JK Rowling (writing as Robert Galbraith) is at her best doing social novels pretending to be detective novels, and not actually so great at detective novels per se. Let me dive into that a little more: one of the most engaging qualities of her Harry Potter series was all the clues she planted in the story early, "plot coupons" to be cashed later. She arranged intricate plots which the young protagonists obviously wouldn't recognize for what they were at the time, but which clever readers could speculate about, only for the truth to be revealed several books later.
With the Cormoran Strike novels, Rowling is mostly writing serially, not a long arc running through the entire series. So you don't need to have read previous books to follow the plot of the current one. That means instead that Rowling follows mystery genre conventions and plants clues throughout a single book so you can piece them together with her detective protagonists at the end.
The problem is that these plots are often very complicated and it stretches credibility that even her clever protagonists, Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, would really be capable of pulling together all the minute details they do, like a witness mentioning straw on a car or who is and isn't in a grainy black and white photo and why someone mentioned pig masks when no one else did and which of several children was on babysitting duty a particular night twelve years ago and so on. Everything does fit together, but it comes together in the end in a sort of "genre-conventional resolution" that is more novelistic than realistic.
I think Rowling is doing this deliberately, though. I think she isn't trying to write strictly believable detective novels, but long social novels with her trademark colorful characters wrapped around a mystery that honors her literary inspirations by delivering big reveals and unmaskings served on a platter at the end.
So the degree to which you enjoy any given Strike novel will be the degree to which you enjoy the central theme. I really liked her last book, The Ink Black Heart, because it was about content creators and toxic online fandom, something Rowling is very familiar with, and which of course generated some drama when she had a go at her own critics.
In The Running Grave, Rowling is having a go at Scientologists. Well, the "Universal Humanitarian Church," which is basically a Scientology-like cult, complete with indoctrination, work camps, children brought up as slaves, founders being treated like divinities, sex abuse, and celebrity converts.
I liked this book, but it wasn't my favorite. It was definitely too long and had too many jigsaw-like puzzle pieces being improbably pieced together for the takedown at the end. It also seemed less well-written; Rowling has always been somewhat inconsistent about POV but usually she limits it to switching between Cormoran and Robin, but in this one, she went full third-person-omniscient. Maybe she did this deliberately, to echo the older works she's been inspired by, but it came off as heavy-handed and intrusive at times. ("Little did they know...")
What puts Robin and Cormoran on the UHC's case is a wealthy civil servant (something that sounds funny in America, unless you count senators as "civil servants") whose son joined the UHC. His family wants to check on him and maybe get him out, but past attempts at contacting him have failed, and knowing that another church member who was basically abducted and subjected to "deprogramming" later committed suicide, they've ruled that out.
Robin goes undercover to join the UHC. She is subjected to various abuses, sees some horrific things, and slowly loses her sense of self before she escapes. It's all written very realistically - Rowling obviously did her homework on cults. And it fills many chapters with a colorful cast of characters, including the main villains, the cult leaders.
But I had a problem with the premise. Robin spends four months with the cult. That means their client is paying, in addition to all the agency's other expenses, for someone to go full-time undercover to be abused by a cult for sixteen weeks. I have to wonder how big a bill that would be and just how rich their client is, because if I were Robin, I'd be expecting a hell of a payday.
It's not enough in this book for Cormoran and Robin to find their client's son: they also uncover evidence of worse wrongdoings by the UHC, and end up blowing it all up, with Cormoran sitting down for a long multi-chapter denunciation at the end where he pulls the mask off the secret villain of the story and explains what really happened.
All of the tropes from earlier books in the series reappear here: the growing cast of characters continues to return for cameos, and Cormoran and Robin continue their will-they-won't-they? dance. Yeah, that one is annoying me. I think it's been stretched out past its expiration date. Rowling also really likes picking some literary work and quoting from it at the beginning of every chapter. In the last book, it was Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, in this one, it's the I-Ching.
I don't think JK Rowling is the greatest writer of our age, but I do think she's on a par with Stephen King, another underrated "genre" writer who often gets accused of writing schlock but manages to be reliably entertaining and captures a lot of rich detail and nuance in ordinary characters thrown into long improbable stories. Rowling's literary influences show in her work, just as King's do.
While the story and the characters were believable, the execution, as I said, veered towards literary indulgence. Not that I didn't enjoy it, but it felt very much like detective characters working their way through a detective novel. Which is okay, I still like these big bloated social-detective novels.
Also by Robert Galbraith: My reviews of The Cuckoo's Calling, The Silkworm, Career of Evil, Lethal White, Troubled Blood, and The Ink Black Heart.
My complete list of book reviews.
Mulholland Books, 2023, 960 pages
In the seventh installment in the Strike series, Cormoran and Robin must rescue a man ensnared in the trap of a dangerous cult.
Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside.
The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organization that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths.
In order to try to rescue Will, Strike's business partner, Robin Ellacott, decides to infiltrate the cult, and she travels to Norfolk to live incognito among its members. But in doing so, she is unprepared for the dangers that await her there or for the toll it will take on her. . .
Utterly pulse-pounding, The Running Grave moves Strike's and Robin's story forward in this epic, unforgettable seventh installment of the series.
I've complained before about the wordiness of the Cormoran Strike novels, but also admitted I kind of enjoyed them. JK Rowling (writing as Robert Galbraith) is at her best doing social novels pretending to be detective novels, and not actually so great at detective novels per se. Let me dive into that a little more: one of the most engaging qualities of her Harry Potter series was all the clues she planted in the story early, "plot coupons" to be cashed later. She arranged intricate plots which the young protagonists obviously wouldn't recognize for what they were at the time, but which clever readers could speculate about, only for the truth to be revealed several books later.
With the Cormoran Strike novels, Rowling is mostly writing serially, not a long arc running through the entire series. So you don't need to have read previous books to follow the plot of the current one. That means instead that Rowling follows mystery genre conventions and plants clues throughout a single book so you can piece them together with her detective protagonists at the end.
The problem is that these plots are often very complicated and it stretches credibility that even her clever protagonists, Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, would really be capable of pulling together all the minute details they do, like a witness mentioning straw on a car or who is and isn't in a grainy black and white photo and why someone mentioned pig masks when no one else did and which of several children was on babysitting duty a particular night twelve years ago and so on. Everything does fit together, but it comes together in the end in a sort of "genre-conventional resolution" that is more novelistic than realistic.
I think Rowling is doing this deliberately, though. I think she isn't trying to write strictly believable detective novels, but long social novels with her trademark colorful characters wrapped around a mystery that honors her literary inspirations by delivering big reveals and unmaskings served on a platter at the end.
So the degree to which you enjoy any given Strike novel will be the degree to which you enjoy the central theme. I really liked her last book, The Ink Black Heart, because it was about content creators and toxic online fandom, something Rowling is very familiar with, and which of course generated some drama when she had a go at her own critics.
In The Running Grave, Rowling is having a go at Scientologists. Well, the "Universal Humanitarian Church," which is basically a Scientology-like cult, complete with indoctrination, work camps, children brought up as slaves, founders being treated like divinities, sex abuse, and celebrity converts.
I liked this book, but it wasn't my favorite. It was definitely too long and had too many jigsaw-like puzzle pieces being improbably pieced together for the takedown at the end. It also seemed less well-written; Rowling has always been somewhat inconsistent about POV but usually she limits it to switching between Cormoran and Robin, but in this one, she went full third-person-omniscient. Maybe she did this deliberately, to echo the older works she's been inspired by, but it came off as heavy-handed and intrusive at times. ("Little did they know...")
What puts Robin and Cormoran on the UHC's case is a wealthy civil servant (something that sounds funny in America, unless you count senators as "civil servants") whose son joined the UHC. His family wants to check on him and maybe get him out, but past attempts at contacting him have failed, and knowing that another church member who was basically abducted and subjected to "deprogramming" later committed suicide, they've ruled that out.
Robin goes undercover to join the UHC. She is subjected to various abuses, sees some horrific things, and slowly loses her sense of self before she escapes. It's all written very realistically - Rowling obviously did her homework on cults. And it fills many chapters with a colorful cast of characters, including the main villains, the cult leaders.
But I had a problem with the premise. Robin spends four months with the cult. That means their client is paying, in addition to all the agency's other expenses, for someone to go full-time undercover to be abused by a cult for sixteen weeks. I have to wonder how big a bill that would be and just how rich their client is, because if I were Robin, I'd be expecting a hell of a payday.
It's not enough in this book for Cormoran and Robin to find their client's son: they also uncover evidence of worse wrongdoings by the UHC, and end up blowing it all up, with Cormoran sitting down for a long multi-chapter denunciation at the end where he pulls the mask off the secret villain of the story and explains what really happened.
All of the tropes from earlier books in the series reappear here: the growing cast of characters continues to return for cameos, and Cormoran and Robin continue their will-they-won't-they? dance. Yeah, that one is annoying me. I think it's been stretched out past its expiration date. Rowling also really likes picking some literary work and quoting from it at the beginning of every chapter. In the last book, it was Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, in this one, it's the I-Ching.
I don't think JK Rowling is the greatest writer of our age, but I do think she's on a par with Stephen King, another underrated "genre" writer who often gets accused of writing schlock but manages to be reliably entertaining and captures a lot of rich detail and nuance in ordinary characters thrown into long improbable stories. Rowling's literary influences show in her work, just as King's do.
While the story and the characters were believable, the execution, as I said, veered towards literary indulgence. Not that I didn't enjoy it, but it felt very much like detective characters working their way through a detective novel. Which is okay, I still like these big bloated social-detective novels.
Also by Robert Galbraith: My reviews of The Cuckoo's Calling, The Silkworm, Career of Evil, Lethal White, Troubled Blood, and The Ink Black Heart.
My complete list of book reviews.