My parents dismissing me with the label ‘reader’, I get books as gifts fairly often. Not having much of a clue what to give me, the books are often picked at random. That’s how I ended up with a copy of The Running Grave. I had never heard of the book, or the author.
I also pretty frequently don’t read these books I receive as parental gifts. Because of a sense of guilt, I decided to put the energy into this one, despite the 900+ page length, and despite that the back blurb informed me that it was the 7th book in a series.
Despite this, it wasn’t all that bad. The author wrote it in such a way where I never felt all that lost from being the 7th book in the series, and the short initial chapters made it feel like it would actually be a pretty easy read.
A well to do and slight autistic young adult finds himself in a cult, and his parents are desperate to get him out. The unrealistically named Cormoran Strike is hired to somehow get the young man off of the cult’s farmgrounds. Again, not having read the previous books the protagonists pre-established relationship with either this cult or a similar one. His partner and potential love interest infiltrates the cult, and everything that follows is just standard detective novel intrigue – people are interviewed, clues are pieced together, and the villains are thwarted.
A third of the way through the book I looked again at the back blurb and learned that Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling. I would be lying if I said that didn’t impact the rest of my reading. Suddenly I kept on seeing parallels to Harry Potter. It probably wasn’t deserved, but there it was. I can’t put my finger on the difference, but this didn’t feel as good as those. Hey, writing is hard, and just like anything else, it is going to get harder, not easier, as one ages. Or maybe Rowling’s gift lies with fantasy. Who knows.
The story wraps up fine. The ‘will they won’t they’ between the protagonist and his partner has a bit of a cliffhanger at the end, that will not get me to read the next edition, unless I by some miracle burn through the rest of my 300+ TBR list.
Failures in Polymathy 