By Miriam R. Kramer
Writing as Robert Galbraith, J.K. Rowling recently birthed a new chapter of her Cormoran Strike mystery series, The Hallmarked Man. The relentless P.I. partners, Cormoran Strike and his partner, Robin Ellacott, gradually lay out puzzle pieces of a central criminal case with their usual kaleidoscopic backdrop of frustrations and spurs to action: thinly disguised enemies, desperate and hostile upper-class clients, underworld contacts, dodgy contractors, lovers, family, and other personal crises to sort out. By book eight in the series, the plot may take the foreground, but Cormoran and Robin’s relationship with the people in their lives and each other has stealthily taken the focus.
It seems that Rowling has become too big a star to succumb to much editing. She desperately needs someone to rein her in and squash a less interesting subplot or five in the interests of appropriate pacing. Rowling could have binned the entire Strike novel The Ink Black Heart. It was over a thousand pages long, and mostly tedious pages at that. Reading it was like wearing a dirty, knotty sweater with eighteen arms. Yet Rowling’s focus on loss and what replaces it has finally started to balance out such indulgences, even as Cormoran and Robin methodically solve the blood-splashed mystery she throws at their feet.
With Robin sick, Cormoran meets alone with Decima Mullins, an anxious woman who is sister to a socialite and daughter to a posh private club owner. Clutching her new baby, she insists that the father, her missing boyfriend, Rupert Fleetwood, must be the dismembered corpse that was found after the weekend in the vault of a silver shop next to Freemasons’ Hall in London—one that sells silver pieces bearing Freemason symbols and hallmarks. The body, decapitated and missing hands and feet, has been brutally hallmarked also.
The police assume that the corpse, that of a new employee with a fake identity, is a convicted robber, the victim of a well-known criminal who happens to be his uncle. Yet several candidates in addition to Decima’s boyfriend turn up, men of the same height and build who disappeared around the same time. These leads send Robin, Cormoran, and their private eye contractors across the country to discover links to human trafficking, potential police corruption, along with the tendrils of other crimes committed.
How can they track a man with no fingerprints or footprints, one whose DNA cannot be matched to a database? Is a local Freemason police officer trying to make sure the focus stays away from Freemason affairs? How might a missing SAS member, the equivalent of an American Delta Force special operative, fit into this picture? Why might they be warned off by MI5, the equivalent of the FBI? These are only a few of the clues for Cormoran and Robin to follow up in this book, but they also serve as a distraction that prolongs the slow burn of making up their minds about what love, friendship, and family mean to them.
Clocking in at over nine hundred pages, her previous mystery The Running Grave may be long, but it is by far the most exciting and suspenseful of all Rowling’s latest installments. (Please see my previous review of The Running Grave: Dark Mysteries During December Festivities – Old Town Crier). Robin goes undercover to penetrate a cult, and a worried Cormoran understands further how his own life, and that of his half-sister, Lucy, were affected negatively by the seed of that cult, a commune where they had spent several months as children with his bohemian super-groupie mother.
His long-held notions about his half-sister shift, and he even sees Robin in a different light as she puts all she is and has on the line to rescue a client’s son from the compound. At the conclusion, Strike comes to the definitive end of an all-consuming romantic relationship. He cannot avoid realizing that he must take his chance at adult happiness as soon as he can.
In this next novel, another doorstopper, taking that chance is Strike’s primary goal, one that shows maturation and a sober realization that he can no longer distract himself with the short-term relationships that have left him perpetually lonely and restless. As he says to Robin about a cheap affair, “When you can’t get what you want, you take what you can get.” When threatened by a journalist out to destroy him, he also finds himself on the verge of accepting family new to him, those from his long-estranged rock star father’s side.
Robin, on the other hand, has come straight back out of her cult infiltration to her relationship with her handsome, kind police detective boyfriend, Ryan Murphy. Suffering from PTSD and a need for space after her experience, she feels smothered by him and her loving but uncomprehending family. Only Cormoran Strike, infuriating, grumpy, and her best friend, can sometimes assuage her need to prove her courage, ability, and identity as a private investigator.
Underneath the mystery the sobering but endearing theme of The Hallmarked Man is family. At age 42, Strike is saying goodbye to his first love and parts of his family who have passed on, along with reevaluating who and what he wants in his future. At age 32, Robin is forced to assess her own fertility after a mishap and think about whether a baby is possible for someone so passionate about a dangerous and all-consuming vocation. Does she want to take her relationship with Ryan, who wants children but has his own issues, further? As she becomes an aunt twice over, she throws herself into work feeling overcome from all sides.
For those who love Rowling’s intricate, slow-burn plotting and vivid, extreme characters, this will be another satisfying installment in the Strike series. As for me, I now realize that I have put up with some very bloated story arcs to get to know personalities that I greatly enjoy: ones that are well-developed, who have come to feel familiar and make sense to me despite and even because of their frenetic, tempestuous backgrounds. Will I put up with another nine-hundred-page novel by this lightly edited marquee author to read resolutions? Stay tuned, but you probably already know the answer.
About the Author: Miriam Kramer worked at Olsson’s Books & Records before it closed in 2008, welcoming Old Town, Alexandria, residents to a unique place where employees with encyclopedic knowledge of literature and music enriched the community. As a global nomad, she has lived, studied, or worked in diverse countries overseas. With her experience writing and studying international affairs, she has promoted democracy, international media, the arts, peace building, and citizen diplomacy during her career.