Lethal White by Robert Galbraith

Lethal White is the fourth detective novel by Robert Galbraith (the pen name of J.K.Rowling) to feature private detective Cormoran Strike and his partner Robin Ellacott.

This story picks up where Career of Evil left off, beginning with Robin’s wedding day. At the end of the last novel she was no longer working for Strike, but they quickly make up and renew their working partnership, much to the annoyance of her new husband Matthew, who did everything in his power to keep them apart, including deleting messages from Robin’s phone. She discovers this fact during their reception, leading to a tempestuous argument.

The story picks up a year later; Robin is in an unhappy marriage still, Strike is in a relationship that is going nowhere, and their working relationship is strained by a lack of communication. Into this atmosphere arrives a strange interaction with a man called Billy, clearly troubled, who seeks Strike’s help with an unclear childhood memory of a child being strangled and buried. Unsure whether Billy’s memory is even real or not, they begin to investigate. When Strike is hired on a more lucrative case from an MP, Jasper Chiswell, who is connected to Billy’s family, he cannot believe it is just a coincidence.

The case is complicated by a suspected murder disguised as suicide and takes both Cormoran and Robin on a series of undercover investigations in Parliament, far-left protest groups, and eventually to Chiswell’s country home… Can they find the murderer in time before he or she kills again?

I really enjoyed the crime elements of this novel, and the twists and turns in the second part of the novel made it hard to put down. I found myself staying awake into the early hours to discover who the murderer was (I hadn’t figured it out for myself!) and I wasn’t disappointed by the highly dramatic denouement presented to the reader. This is the fourth novel featuring Strike and Ellacott and I was certainly left hoping for more in the future.

However, the first part of the novel was a little too slow paced at times, with a few too many descriptions of Robin’s domestic misery. I think some of these were important and I’ve always liked novels which deal with the personal as well as the professional but at times it left the novel lacking pace and drama. Anyone who has read the first three books probably loves-to-hate Robin’s now-husband Matthew, and readers picking up this novel first can probably quickly work out that he’s horribly possessive jealous and controlling… I just felt we didn’t need quite so many descriptions of his home life with Robin.

Overall, this didn’t massively spoil my enjoyment of the novel; it was still great fun to read and I thought it was a fantastic crime novel, which left me hoping for a fifth in the series.