REVIEWED BY DAVID VINEYARD:         


ROBERT GALBRAITH – Lethal White. Cormoran Strike #4. Mulholland Books, hardcover, September 2018.

   â€œIf I knew Strike would want me back would I have married Matthew?”

   That’s the question Robin Ellacott, secretary and operative of Cormoran Strike’s small detective agency asks herself on her wedding night when she learns her former boss wants her back after they have made national news capturing the Shakewell Ripper in the previous novel, Career of Evil.

   Her relationship with her wounded war veteran boss, Strike, is complicated at best, the two a team reliant on each other, but dancing around the other issues coming from their relationship, him dealing with his missing leg and painful stump and she with anxiety attacks after nearly being killed by the Shakewell Ripper.

   A year later things are still at loggerheads when an emotionally and mentally disturbed boy named Billy shows up in Strike’s office with a story of a crime he witnessed as a child: “Ages, I was a kid … Little Girl it was, but after they said it was a little boy. Jimmy was there, he says I never saw it, but I did. I saw him do it, Strangled. I saw it.”. Billy’s memory is inexact, but Strike believes him and takes up the case.

   His new found fame makes it harder to keep a low profile though. People expect him to be delving into something major and clam up. Meanwhile he and Robin, the latter only a year into a marriage she still questions, have to navigate their increasingly difficult relationship and her less than perfect marriage.

   The unlikely murder of a little girl, or was it a little boy, takes Strike and Robin from the back streets of London to the secret sanctums of Parliament, to a grand manor house in the country, with one obstruction and red herring after another thrown in their path as they try to uncover the truth behind a confused boy’s memory of a crime no one believes he witnessed and a tie to a priceless painting hiding in plain sight and worth killing for.

    Lethal White is a long book, in fact, it weighs in at over six hundred pages, but then it is written by someone known for writing densely plotted long books readers plunge into willingly. Perhaps the remarkable thing about this series and Galbraith (which has inspired television adaptations, too) is that you won’t find a single mention in the hardcover edition of this book that Robert Galbraith is the pseudonym of one of the most popular and successful writers of the last few decades, J. K, Rowiling of Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts fame.

   Fairly compared to the best of Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and Peter Robinson, Robert Galbraith deserves all the attention and accolades even without knowing who lies behind the pseudonym. Cormoran Strike and Robin are believable characters, flawed and human, and among the most attractive and intriguing sleuths currently around.

   I know many of you aren’t great fans of these dense long books and wonder how the writer can call anything that long suspense or maintain the mystery element, but I can only say in this one case it feels effortless, and unlike many writers who work at this length, the attractive detectives are on stage for all the action, always at the center of things, in a book that mixes hard-boiled, classical, satire, and romance in a heady mix.

   …September was doing its best to wash away the memory of the long, Union-Jacked summer days …

   The dirt on his windsheild shimmered and blurred in the setting sunlight …

   â€œYou just ate half a potato field and most of a cow.”

   The slate grey Thames rolled eternally on, its surface barely troubled by the thickening rain …

   â€œâ€¦ Death rides a white horse in Revelations, though.”
   â€œA pale horse,” Strike corrected her winding down the window again so he could smoke.
   â€œPedant.”
   â€œSays the woman who won’t call a brown horse brown.”

   â€œPure white foal, seems healthy when its born, but defective bowel .. they can’t survive lethal whites …”

   Such is the universal desire for fame that that those who achieve it accidentally or unwillingly will wait in vain for pity.

   Writing like that makes taking on six hundred plus pages a pleasure.