Reviewed by Harriet
If you should care to do so, you could do a search on Shiny for reviews of novels by Robert Galbraith (aka J K Rowling). You’ll find four, starting in 2013 and finishing last year. All written by me, with a mixture of enthusiasm and admiration. How I did love these clever, complex novels, both for their intriguing plots and for the constantly simmering relationship between the two main protagonists, private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott. Do we want them to get together? On a strictly personal level yes we do, but on another we have to ask ourselves what this will do to future novels if they do. I can’t help feeling that the tension, which continues throughout all Galbraith’s previous seven novels, would be radically diminished if they became a couple. Of course it continues in this, the eighth, in which Robin is loyally sticking with Ryan Murphy, her policeman boyfriend, and rather forcibly suppressing feelings for Strike which she is convinced she shouldn’t be having. As for Strike, the pressure of keeping quiet is getting too much, and he’s determined to tell Robin how much he loves her. The romance plot is, I would judge, more foregrounded than ever, and of course I’m not going to tell you what happens this time round.
But this is a crime novel, so what’s the crime? It starts with a rather posh woman called Decima, who is living alone in the countryside with her newborn son, hiring the detectives to find out whether the child’s father is alive or dead. They seemed very happy together, but he disappeared one day and she hasn’t heard from him. She suspects he may be the unidentified body recently found in a vault full of masonic silver, and, surprisingly, hopes it is him, as the idea that he had left because he didn’t love her is far harder to bear. So starts a search for the identity of the corpse, which had had all identifying features removed. The police think they know who it is, but they are almost certainly wrong. Robin and Strike get on the trail, dashing around London and the countryside, interviewing a bewilderingly large number of people with double-barrelled names, all of whom are somehow related or connected through family marriages. And then there’s another group composed of village dwellers, who range from relatively comfortable middle-class to rather unpleasant ne-er-do-wells. Several young women seem to be connected with this group in some way, but most of them have disappeared. Obviously all this gets sorted out in the end, with Strike and Robin working out who is who and what really happened in the vault. As for poor Decima’s quandary, it’s finally resolved in rather an interesting twist.
Freemasonry, as you can imagine, plays a large part in the story, with Strike and Robin having to learn to decipher symbols, understand masonic silver hallmarks, some of which have been carved into the body, learn the occult terms (do you know what a nef is?*) and read the ancient instruction books which are part of the sect’s basic rules. Several high-up policemen turn out to be members of the Lodge connected to the vault where the body was found, causing problems for an investigation by free-lance detectives. Strike often finds himself in situations where excess walking or climbing steep stairs puts too much pressure on the amputated leg which holds his prothesis, and Robin is suffering from PDSD following her dangerous undercover operation in the shocking cult which occurred in the previous novel, The Running Grave, as well as being severely triggered by events that take her back to the most stressful era of her life.
I see the novel has had very positive reviews, but I’m sorry to say I was disappointed. I really wished it had had one of those dramatis personae lists of all the characters because I found them incredibly confusing, and as a result found the intricacies of the plot very hard to follow. I also read one review that praised Rowling’s prose, but I thought it was quite clunky in places. I was incredibly irritated by her constant use of ‘the latter’ when two people appear in the same sentence. As a dedicated proofreader, every time I encountered one of these I found myself thinking how the sentence could be re-worded to avoid this very outdated usage. I didn’t like the reproduction of the accents of some of the characters (‘Aye, mebbe… I was gonnae… but it’s no’ righ’) and I couldn’t see the relevance of many of the curious Victorian quotes used as epigraphs on each chapter.
All this sounds as if I hated it, but I didn’t, just didn’t love it as much as I did all the others. I don’t want to put readers off, and I’m sure a great many people will love the novel as much as most of the reviewers obviously did. My quibbles will not stop me from seizing the next book in the series, if only to find out the latest about Robin and Strike – will they or won’t they?
* A 16th century silver clock in the form of a ship having mechanical devices to illustrate astronomical movements.
Harriet is a co-editor and one of the founders of Shiny.
Robert Galbraith, The Hallmarked Man (Sphere, 2025). 978-1408723784, 917pp., hardback.
