By Miriam R. Kramer
Few kill time during the holidays. There’s just too much to say, cook, and do. That being said, you may dedicate your spare, scattered hours to reading in between your travels to visit family or preparations to welcome them. I know that if I don’t have a chance to read and refresh myself, I don’t feel prepared to do too much else. This month two new mysteries impressed me: The Running Grave, by Robert Galbraith, and Black River, by Matthew Spencer.
The Running Grave serves as the seventh installment in the popular series J.K. Rowling writes under the nom de plume Robert Galbraith. If you have read my column for a while, you will know that I panned its predecessor, The Ink Black Heart, for its verbosity, sloth-like pace, and difficult-to-read layout that involved long side-by-side phone texts between characters. Nor did I care what happened to any of its characters. Rowling is not known to stint her words, and she badly needed an editor to stand up to her and prune it back. I even thought of not reading the next book.
Luckily, I can report the opposite for this next novel in the series. The Running Grave, while long, had me looking forward to returning to it after taking a break. Cormoran Strike, ex-military police and private detective, and Robin Ellacott, who starts as secretary and becomes his partner at the agency, have matured over the years they have worked together. Their sexual tension has remained on a slow boil as they distract themselves with other romantic or sexual partners.
In The Running Grave, Robin goes undercover as Rowena Ellis at a cult in Norfolk, England, known as the Universal Humanitarian Church (UHC). She and Cormoran have taken on a client who wants to persuade his son to come home. She poses as a gullible, wealthy woman who goes on a week-long retreat and allows herself to be persuaded to stay. Before she goes, her agency partner realizes he lived at the dodgy communal farm as a child with his half-sister and drugged-up, groupie mother, Leda. Rowling sets the scene with his memories of his time there, in the same way that Matthew Spencer does with his reporter character in Black River.
While Robin ensconces herself within the church’s community and hierarchy, Strike deals with the day-to-day difficulty of finding good PIs for the agency, handling the bad ones, and solving other crimes the agency has on its books. His burgeoning feelings for Robin bubble over so he becomes jealous of her policeman boyfriend. His worry for her often overtakes him as agency members keep in touch with her weekly through a hole in the fence around the church’s farm
In the meantime, Robin desperately strives to maintain her sense of self and sanity, as she is exposed to indoctrination to worship false UHC prophets based on dead former members of the church. While working to contact her client’s son, she also discovers a potential murder mystery to investigate in her minimal spare time.
Rowling has done her research in depicting the psychological pressures put on people in cults. This long book moves at a fast pace, as she vividly paints a picture of Robin, deprived of sleep and food, tap dancing her way through potential minefields to maintain connections with fanatics brainwashed by the cult. The leaders abusing their powers see her as their next potential victim and wonder at her independent turn of mind. I thought of Scientology when they punish Robin for not giving enough money to the cult, since Scientologists must pay significant amounts to have the opportunity to achieve higher levels of enlightenment.
I really enjoyed this novel because it contained a clear storyline and an inside look at an all-too-common scenario in which people give up agency for the ease of being told what to do. I also thought that Rowling’s focus on Cormoran’s understanding of himself, his past, and his need to seize the day was a welcome change in this series. I would recommend the novel for its lively storytelling, compelling hero and heroine, grisliness, humor, and self-reflection.
Black River, by Matthew Spencer, features other charms. Spencer’s writer’s voice is worth reading for his language alone, particularly in comparison with many well-known authors who churn out junk food bestsellers that sell well despite their quality. He writes with spare, punchy language this story featuring Adam Bowman, a reporter outside of Sydney, Australia, and Detective Sergeant Rose Riley, a tough policewoman with the requisite drive and perspective to rise through the ranks.
Adam, enduring a low-level midlife crisis, meets Rose in reporting on the murder of a woman who lives on the grounds of a prestigious private high school for rich and well-connected boys. The chaplain’s daughter, she has been found on the grounds wrapped in black plastic like the victims of a serial killer who has been prowling and killing women on a local river. Adam himself attended the school as the son of the chaplain at that time, and also lived at her house, Ghost Gum.
Rose uses Adam to release information to the public at crucial times, and he uses her as an inside source. As Rose and her fellow officers on the Satyr Strike Force investigate school personnel, Adam’s relevant past at Ghost Gum and his alma mater informs the present, coloring his views and creating links that help him guide Rose. Tension rises as they explore corruption at the school to see how it guides the murder investigation, and become reluctant colleagues.
This book is the first in a series featuring Rose Riley. I am intrigued to know more about her. I want to see how her character reveals more about the person behind the cynicism and the reasons driving what she does.
If there is anything that bothers me about much detective fiction, it is the simplistic language and emphasis on plot over character as a way to hook people into buying a fast, disposable read. Here Matthew Spencer writes economically but with verve and an accurate eye. His characters come to life. This novel’s dark, gritty atmosphere, punctuated with vivid police jargon and Australian slang, kept me reading.
So, I recommend both of these mysteries that surpass the usual airplane novel in their complexity and compulsive readability. If you need a change from holiday cheer, this is a way to escape to England or Australia for a hardboiled literary fix.