Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The third Cormoran Strike book, Career of Evil opens with the delivery of a foot. It’s the kind of thing that tells you everything you need to know about the rest of the book. Vonnegut once said, “readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.” Except for the actual identity of the killer, that’s true of Career of Evil. We pretty much know which tensions are going to build throughout, and how.
Working within an established narrative framework is where J.K. Rowling shines. It is not less creative or less artistic to write that way! It can be more difficult.
There are a few nice touches that deserve mention.
There’s a horror movie cliche where the man tells the woman to stay in the car/house/room/spaceship and she doesn’t. And then she dies. Rowling plays with this expectation throughout the novel. We know Robin is in danger — we have scenes of the villain stalking her! We know Cormoran is right to try and protect her. And we also know that she’s competent to handle the danger. And both main characters know all these things too.
Both of them know the danger; both of them respect her competence. So the conflict which, in a horror movie, is caused by mutual idiocy, is caused instead by mutual goodwill.
I also like that she gives us three possible killers right off the bat. In a traditional Christie-style detective novel, the whole milieu is under suspicion. There’s a delight in finding the villain in the least expected character. But here there’s no possibility of that; we know the three it might be from the start. That narrowed field ought to help the reader find the same clue the detective does. It didn’t work for me, but I never solve the case before Miss Marple or Cormoran Strike does.
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