★★★★☆ The Ink Black Heart, by Robert Galbraith, AKA JK Rowling
Friends or lovers?
The Ink Black Heart
Robert Galbraith, AKA JK Rowling
Friends or lovers?
One of my first considerations when I rate a book is how I felt on finishing. If, when I finish, I sigh with the relief of a tedious job finished, that book is probably not going to get a rating above three stars. If I wish that the book could have gone on longer and look forward to the next installment, then that is likely to be a four or five-star book. Now, The Ink Black Heart is a long book -- the kindle edition is listed as 1272 pages. But it didn't feel long. I was turning pages as eagerly at the end as at the beginning, and I look forward to seeing what happens to Cormoran and Robin in installment seven. J.K. Rowling knows how to tell a story.
Ink Black Heart has two plots. The first, which is actually the central plot of the Comoran Strike series, concerns the relationship between Strike and his business partner Robin Ellacott. The second is the murder mystery.
At the end of the previous book Troubled Blood, Strike and Robin recognized that they had become each other's best friends. Because we are inside their heads, we know that each of them has occasionally experienced more romantic feelings, but these have not been acknowledged. The central question of the Strike/Robin relationship, then, is "Is it better to be friends, or lovers?" For me personally this is one of the most interesting and attractive aspects of the books. We Who Read are awash in romance novels in which "falling in love" is taken to be the highest possible point of any interpersonal relationship. In most fiction, friendship between a man and a woman (substitute genders as appropriate for non-cishet characters) appears only as a way-station on the path towards full-on romance.
The mystery plot takes place largely on the Internet. Here I have a bit of advice to readers: There are a lot of characters, and keeping track of them is not always easy. Make yourself a crib sheet listing the user IDs of players in Drek's Game, their real names, and their twitter handles. You will only gradually learn these, but by the end of the book you have been told who most of the Game-players are. I wish someone had given me this advice -- it would have made the story easier to follow.
If you're a devotee of mystery novels, you may not like this one much. There are a lot of rules that mystery novels are supposed to follow, and by those criteria Ink Black Heart would be disappointing. I personally didn't mind, because I read a mystery the way I read any other novel -- as a story with characters and plot. The main thing I didn't like about the murder mystery is that Robin and Strike are not very clever. Most of their difficulties have to do with not understanding the Internet as well as they ought to, and their discoveries often come down simply to learning about common Internet tricks. Also, they don't actually solve the mystery. They find out who the murderer is by breaking into a house where he/she is literally in the process of attempting to murder other characters, and almost getting murdered themselves. Definitely not Robin and Corm's shining moment as detectives.
Still, if you are or can put yourself into the necessary mindset of Internet naivete, the story is pretty good. As I said already, it kept me turning the pages -- all 1272 of them!