As with JK’s other mystery novels, this is well-constructed. The pacing is superb; the emotional beats fall right where they’re supposed to. The characters are realistic and compelling, although not fascinating in their own right.

Lethal White is halfway through the romantic arc at the center of the series. We all know Cormoran and Robin are going to end up together. We all know Matthew is a jerk. Everything is inevitable, and we’re watching the progression as it happens. But it’s satisfying, in a certain way, and it moves the story along.

This novel has an interesting quality. Since Oedipus Rex, a lot of mystery novels have focused on long-past crimes. The sins of the past making themselves felt in the present. Generational curses, excavated and exorcised. That way, the detective can solve the mystery with wisdom, rather than mere cleverness. It’s almost a core principle of structuring one of these.

And this novel seems like a recapitulation of that principle. Scenes of violence dimly remembered by a child. Something about execution equipment. But it turns out that the crimes of the past aren’t that bad. They’re wicked, sure, but not murder. And certainly not as bad as we imagine. They’ve grown in power over the years, and by contemporary re-interpretation. It’s the crimes of the present that the forces of good actually need to deal with.

This is one more example of my Rowling opinion: When she has an established literary structure to work within, she excels.

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Who can argue with classic Christie? The Queen of Detective Fiction. Also the prime example of the locked room mystery.

But it was a little too far-fetched for the solution to be satisfying to me. It was impressive that Poirot could figure it out. Also impressive that Christie could weave such an intricate plot. But the kind of conspiracy it depicts seems outside the range of likely human behavior. Christie is at her best when she’s excavating the murder that lies in each of our hearts. When I’ve got a little bit of the villain in me. That just didn’t seem to me to be the case here.

Funny story: Part of the backstory for this novel is based on the Lindbergh kidnapping. Just a few months after reading it, I heard an old story from my mom’s side of the family. They’re Swedish, and as a child, my grandfather had had very blond, curly hair. On a car trip from Washington, D.C. to North Carolina, they were pulled over by the police and had no end of trouble proving that my grandpa wasn’t the Lindbergh baby. So that’s a weird little codicil to my few words on Murder on the Orient Express.

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The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag by Alan Bradley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the second in the Flavia de Luce mystery series. It’s a charming little story, equal parts creepy and pastoral, as is the golden age tradition.

There are some gems of hidden metaphorical resonance. Sympathetic vibrations between puppetry and death by hanging. With Jack and the Beanstalk: the past as giantland, a dead son as Jack, an abusive womanizer as the giant. Flavia, I think, is the singing harp from the story. I don’t know. That’s the thing with mysterious internal resonances; you don’t know.

The one structural problem is that there’s nothing that compels the sleuth’s involvement. For Flavia, nothing is at stake. She likes getting into everybody’s business, and she loves murder, and that’s all. So there’s a lack of tension that comes from that. Flavia could walk away from the whole affair at any moment and be none the worse for wear.

And there’s a way the author has of moving Flavia around the setting like a chess piece. She needs to be there to see X, Y and Z and by gum, she’s going to get there on her trusty bicycle! She has no real reason to go to these places except nosiness. And that gets you a certain amount, because it’s a well-established character trait. But it doesn’t pay for all the scene changes the author tries to buy with it.

I call it a fun entry in the detective fiction canon. Recommended for those who enjoy precocious children and dark secrets.



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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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The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I often think about the gadget from Men in Black that erases peoples’ memories. How terrible would it be for that to get into villainous hands? Erasing the memory of your crimes is almost as good as having a ring of Gyges!

Except it’s not that good. It won’t work for all crimes. For instance, if you steal somebody’s car and erase their memory of the theft, what good does it do you? There’s auto loan paperwork and receipts for oil changes. The dealership is going to keep sending them letters about recalls. Worst of all, the DMV has everything on file, and they talk to the police.

The world contains so many traces of that human-car relationship. Your disruption of that relationship is going to get detected, no matter who forgets about it.

For most crimes, the memory gadget only gives some tangential or provisional immunity. It could be one element in a villain’s strategy. But not for emotional abuse. For emotional abuse, it would cover up and erase the whole crime. Submerge it.

The Men in Black memory gadget is, of course, a symbol for gaslighting. And that’s why you can see its shadow falling on every page of The Girl On the Train.

This is a detective novel with the virtues of the unreliable narrator technique. The unreliable sleuth.

In another novel, I would consider it a failing for a major plot point to hang on the protagonist’s memory. It would be a form of deus ex machina. If the sleuth had the solution all along, but had forgotten it, it’s a problem. It means their victory has nothing to do with the rest of the plot of the book.

But The Girl On the Train is exactly about the protagonist’s memory. It’s about the gaslighting. The plot is to confront the loss of memory.



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The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Sequel to The Cuckoo’s Calling, this book is better written. Or, maybe, I’ve gotten used to Galbraith’s prose style. It doesn’t have the third-person-omniscient-related problems the other had, at least.

Plot-wise, it’s very well constructed. Aspiring detective fiction authors should make a chart of the conflicts. Every situation that every character is in has some form of suspense-building conflict. At any moment there are four or five dominoes that Galbraith has set up. She could knock any of them down to cause her protagonist realistic trouble. And she’s set them all up so she can do it whenever is convenient for the plot. The leg, money, Robin’s fiancee, Strike’s ex, Strike’s dad, et cetera.

One problem with the plot is that much of the suspense of the last few chapters is arbitrary. Strike sends two friends to get two final pieces of evidence. But the narrative leaves out what they’re looking for. It omits all details about their instructions. So we’re not in suspense about something in the world of the book. The protagonist knows the information we want; but the narrator won’t tell us. It’s frustrating.

She does this so that the big reveal can happen all at once. And the big reveal in Silkworm is very, very good. I realized who the murderer was right on cue, from a clue that nobody in the story mentioned. That’s exquisite: chef’s kiss.

I only wish she had found another way to withhold the key information from me besides just… withholding it.

It reminds me of Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry From Kensington. I suppose writers have the right to set their novels in the world of publishing. It’s good that she waited for the second book in the series, though. Writers writing about writing gets boring quick; we have to know there’s more to it than that.

I wonder if the manner of the murder isn’t Rowling saying something to the Harry Potter fan-fiction community? In fact, I would be surprised if they haven’t dissected Silkworm to the tune of hundreds of pages. The plot yells that novels are symbolic. That they say something about their author’s lives. And then it yanks that idea away.

Maybe, in the end, it’s a version of Nabokov’s Symbols and Signs…



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The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Cuckoo’s Calling is a pretty good murder mystery. I’d say it scores an 8 on the Agatha Christie Scale. (Where Nemesis = 10 and At Bertram’s Hotel = 1.)

Reading this, I would say, proves conclusively that Harry Potter was not a fluke. Rowling should be as respected as her sales indicate.

I do have a problem with the ‘omniscient third person’ point of view. I don’t actually believe such a thing exists. But in any case, if you’re attempting it, you have to be a bit more careful than we see in The Cuckoo’s Calling. You see, anglophone readers assume that every sentence in the narrator’s voice has been filtered through the consciousness of one particular character. Authors let us know which character that is by narrating something only they could know.

If you switch back and forth between viewpoints, you have to be careful about any subjective information you narrate during the switch, because your readers won’t know which character’s subjectivity that information belongs to. There are a few trip-ups in this regard in The Cuckoo’s Calling, and it can be confusing.

Authors who want to write from multiple viewpoints should learn from Zadie Smith. She does a wonderful job of this.

The Cuckoo’s Calling has awesome potential as a series. She’s setting up lots and lots of relationships and complexity that she can draw on in later books. It’s going to be incredible, a couple of books from now, when Strike’s ex gets in trouble with the law. With multiple novels-worth of development already invested into their relationship, it’ll be gripping.



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This is a very charming mystery. The child protagonist is very well done. The things she realizes and doesn’t realize match her character, a mark of authorial care. She also has that obsessiveness with her hobby (poison) that endears you to people. Even if it’s a creepy hobby.

The depiction of 1950s England is pretty fun, too.

A murder mystery in which stamp collecting is an important feature. Could there be anything more Golden Age of the Detective Novel? Agatha Christie would be proud.

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This series is YA Dexter. Which is fine. No problem. I hope Dexter becomes a whole sub-genre.

But this is a sequel, and that presents some problems. Wells does a pretty good job dealing with them. The twist at the end of the first book, for instance, can’t work twice. So he puts in a red herring that can only work after that twist.

It’s a clever technique. You can’t do the same twist twice, because you put some assumptions in your reader’s heads the first time. But you can turn that into an advantage! What technique depends on assumptions in your reader’s heads? The red herring.

It’s a good red herring.

The other sequel problem is getting new or distant readers up to speed. I think Wells could spend a little less time explaining what happened in the first book.

My own current feeling on this subject (which may change) is that if you put “Book Two” on the cover, you don’t have to explain. If somebody needs to know what happened in the first book, they should read the first book. Like, if the novel isn’t a stand-alone, it doesn’t have to stand alone.

It probably depends on your genre, too. YA novels might need to stand alone a bit better than, say, epic fantasy.

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The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is mostly about a very particular part of the British countryside, the fens, and loving descriptions of it and the things that happen there and the kind of people who live there.

It’s also about churchbells. Sayers has to have done a great deal of studying churchbells. There’s a whole British way of ringing bells that’s interesting and difficult and mathematical.

The ‘tailors’ aren’t tailors, by the way. They’re bells.

Bunter is awesome. So competent and great.

Also, I really liked how the solution to the mystery was revealed. It was an exquisitely-timed release of information. Delivered with a precision-calibrated surgical heat-seeking trajectory.



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