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Summary
Summary
A disturbing package leads Detective Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin Ellacott to investigate four dangerous murder suspects in this "magnetic" British mystery (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times ) that inspired the acclaimed HBO Max series C.B. Strike . When Robin Ellacott opens an unexpected delivery, she is horrified to discover that it contains a woman's severed leg. Her boss, private detective Cormoran Strike, is less surprised but just as alarmed. He suspects that four people from his past could be responsible -- and any one of them is capable of sustained and unspeakable brutality. With the police focusing on the one suspect Strike has essentially ruled out, he and Robin take matters into their own hands and delve into the dark and twisted worlds of the other three men. But as more horrendous acts occur, time is running out for the two of them . . . Career of Evil is the third in J. K. Rowling's highly acclaimed series featuring private detective Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin Ellacott. A fiendishly clever mystery with unexpected twists around every corner, Career of Evil is also a gripping story of a man and a woman at a crossroads in their personal and professional lives.
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
A murderer is trailing his next victim ... Career of Evil is the new novel -- following the bestsellers The Cuckoo's Calling and The Silkworm -- to feature detective Cormoran Strike. This is the first chapter 2011 This Ain't the Summer of Love He had not managed to scrub off all her blood. A dark line like a parenthesis lay under the middle fingernail of his left hand. He set to digging it out, although he quite liked seeing it there: a memento of the previous day's pleasures. After a minute's fruitless scraping, he put the bloody nail in his mouth and sucked. The ferrous tang recalled the smell of the torrent that had splashed wildly on to the tiled floor, spattering the walls, drenching his jeans and turning the peach-coloured bath towels -- fluffy, dry and neatly folded -- into blood-soaked rags. Colours seemed brighter this morning, the world a lovelier place. He felt serene and uplifted, as though he had absorbed her, as though her life had been transfused into him. They belonged to you once you had killed them: it was a possession way beyond sex. Even to know how they looked at the moment of death was an intimacy way past anything two living bodies could experience. With a thrill of excitement he reflected that nobody knew what he had done, nor what he was planning to do next. He sucked his middle finger, happy and at peace, leaning up against the warm wall in the weak April sunshine, his eyes on the house opposite. It was not a smart house. Ordinary. A nicer place to live, admittedly, than the tiny flat where yesterday's blood-stiffened clothing lay in black bin bags, awaiting incineration, and where his knives lay gleaming, washed clean with bleach, rammed up behind the U-bend under the kitchen sink. This house had a small front garden, black railings and a lawn in need of mowing. Two white front doors had been crammed together side by side, showing that the three-storey building had been converted into upper and lower flats. A girl called Robin Ellacott lived on the ground floor. Though he had made it his business to find out her real name, inside his own head he called her The Secretary. He had just seen her pass in front of the bow window, easily recognisable because of her bright hair. Watching The Secretary was an extra, a pleasurable add-on. He had a few hours spare so he had decided to come and look at her. Today was a day of rest, between the glories of yesterday and tomorrow, between the satisfaction of what had been done and the excitement of what would happen next. The right-hand door opened unexpectedly and The Secretary came out, accompanied by a man. Still leaning into the warm wall, he stared along the street with his profile turned towards them, so that he might appear to be waiting for a friend. Neither of them paid him any attention. They walked off up the street, side by side. After he had given them a minute's head start, he decided to follow. She was wearing jeans, a light jacket and flat-heeled boots. Her long wavy hair was slightly ginger now that he saw her in the sunshine. He thought he detected a slight reserve between the couple, who weren't talking to each other. He was good at reading people. He had read and charmed the girl who had died yesterday among the blood-soaked peach towels. Down the long residential street he tracked them, his hands in his pockets, ambling along as though heading for the shops, his sunglasses unremarkable on this brilliant morning. Trees waved gently in the slight spring breeze. At the end of the street the pair ahead turned left into a wide, busy thoroughfare lined with offices. Sheet glass windows blazed high above him in the sunlight as they passed the Ealing council building. Now The Secretary's flatmate, or boyfriend, or whatever he was -- clean-cut and square-jawed in profile -- was talking to her. She returned a short answer and did not smile. They belonged to you once you had killed them: it was a possession way beyond sex Women were so petty, mean, dirty and small. Sulky bitches, the lot of them, expecting men to keep them happy. Only when they lay dead and empty in front of you did they become purified, mysterious and even wonderful. They were entirely yours then, unable to argue or struggle or leave, yours to do with whatever you liked. The other one's corpse had been heavy and floppy yesterday after he had drained it of blood: his life-sized plaything, his toy. Through the bustling Arcadia shopping centre he followed The Secretary and her boyfriend, gliding behind them like a ghost or a god. Could the Saturday shoppers even see him, or was he somehow transformed, doubly alive, gifted with invisibility? They had arrived at a bus stop. He hovered nearby, pretending to look through the door of a curry house, at fruit piled high in front of a grocer's, at cardboard masks of Prince William and Kate Middleton hanging in a newsagent's window, watching their reflections in the glass. They were going to get on the Number 83. He did not have a lot of money in his pockets, but he was so enjoying watching her that he did not want it to end yet. As he climbed aboard behind them he heard the man mention Wembley Central. He bought a ticket and followed them upstairs. The couple found seats together, right at the front of the bus. He took a place nearby, next to a grumpy woman whom he forced to move her bags of shopping. Their voices carried sometimes over the hum of the other passengers. When not talking, The Secretary looked out of the window, unsmiling. She did not want to go wherever they were going, he was sure of it. When she pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes he noticed that she was wearing an engagement ring. So she was going to be getting married ... or so she thought. He hid his faint smile in the upturned collar of his jacket. The warm midday sun was pouring through the dirt-stippled bus windows. A group of men got on and filled the surrounding seats. A couple of them were wearing red and black rugby shirts. He felt, suddenly, as though the day's radiance had dimmed. Those shirts, with the crescent moon and star, had associations he did not like. They reminded him of a time when he had not felt like a god. He did not want his happy day spotted and stained by old memories, bad memories, but his elation was suddenly draining away. Angry now -- a teenage boy in the group caught his eye, but looked hurriedly away, alarmed -- he got up and headed back to the stairs. He was going to have revenge on Cormoran Strike. He was going to wreak havoc upon him A father and his small son were holding tight to the pole beside the bus doors. An explosion of anger in the pit of his stomach: he should have had a son. Or rather, he should still have had a son. He pictured the boy standing beside him, looking up at him, hero-worshipping him -- but his son was long gone, which was entirely due to a man called Cormoran Strike. He was going to have revenge on Cormoran Strike. He was going to wreak havoc upon him. When he reached the pavement he looked up at the bus's front windows and caught one last glimpse of The Secretary's golden head. He would be seeing her again in less than twenty-four hours. That reflection helped calm the sudden rage caused by the sight of those Saracens shirts. The bus rumbled off and he strode away in the opposite direction, soothing himself as he walked. He had a wonderful plan. Nobody knew. Nobody suspected. And he had something very special waiting for him in the fridge at home. (c) 2015 JK Rowling. Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith is published by Sphere on 20 October at [pound]20. To order a copy for [pound]16, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of [pound]1.99. Chapter 2 of the novel is published in the current edition of Time Magazine. - Robert Galbraith.
New York Review of Books Review
THE DEATH OF Cedric Diggory is one of the most interesting moments of J. K. Rowling's very, very interesting career. It comes almost exactly at the midway point of the Harry Potter novels, after Harry and his friends have successfully thwarted Voldemort several times already; on this occasion, though, Cedric, innocent of any involvement in their enmity, happens to be present. "Kill the spare," Voldemort says, and there he goes, murdered, the first truly substantial character in the series whose death we see in real time. Children's stories are often powerfully reassuring. You don't control much when you're young, and your fears can be so vivid that it's a relief to see them first adduced and then defeated in a book, a movie. When Rowling wrote the words "the spare," though - a chilling turn of phrase, capturing all the jaded obscenity of Voldemort's violence - she refused to offer any longer the comforting pattern of peril and triumph that she had in Harry's earlier adventures. Not everybody was going to make it back to the shire. What Rowling writes these days, under the pen name Robert Galbraith, are crime novels: the closest equivalent adults have to the apotropaic formula of childhood literature, parading the unimaginable in front of us and then solving it, stabilizing it. It seems clear, perhaps, that Rowling feels at home as a writer in a certain kind of consoling narrative. But it also seems clear that she's honest enough to push back against the self-deceptions that lurk within it. This feeling of resistance is what gives such emotional depth to "Career of Evil," her gripping third novel about the private investigative team of Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, which (especially in its subtle shift of focus toward Robin) achieves a new candor about the gap between solving crimes and repairing their damages. The first two Galbraith books established Strike and Robin's relationship. He's a big, lumpy veteran who lost part of his leg during a stint with the military police in Afghanistan, astute but matter-of-fact and also very attractive to women, despite looking like Beethoven "with a buggered nose." At the outset of the series, his one-man London detective agency needs some temp help, and Robin arrives. She's beautiful, capable if a little shaky in her confidence, and soon enough indispensable. In "The Cuckoo's Calling" and "The Silkworm," Strike and Robin work together to solve the murders of a model and an infamous author - occasion for Rowling to offer some tart interpretations of celebrity culture and literary envy, and more seriously to establish the appealing, believable friendship of her two central characters. As "Career of Evil" begins, a package arrives at their Denmark Street office. It holds a woman's severed leg, plainly a message for Strike, it would seem, given his disability. He comes up with a list of people from his life who might be responsible. (Robin, sounding a bit like Ron Weasley, says: "You know four men who'd send you a severed leg? Four?") Rowling alternates their search for these men with a sequence of dark, finely drawn chapters from the perspective of their psychotic stalker, a murderer of women whose next target, it soon becomes obvious, is Robin. This makes Strike worry, which is the perfect way for Rowling to put new pressure on the pair. Robin's marriage to her high school sweetheart is approaching, but she's ambivalent about it, while Strike doesn't even quite dare to articulate to himself his feelings for his partner. The seamless way Rowling integrates these personal and professional story lines makes "Career of Evil" an absorbing book, pulpy, fast and satisfying. Imperfect, too, in fairness - Rowling calibrated her prose carefully in "The Casual Vacancy," as if to show she could do it, but her old infelicities of language have returned. On the other hand, her powers of observation have grown sharper. She can effortlessly evoke the vulnerability of a teenage girl, for instance, "the slenderness of her twig-like legs," and how it's "emphasized by her clumpy trainers." The previous two books were also observant and engaging, though. When "Career of Evil" feels special - a step forward for a series that has been more concerned with entertainment than complexity at times - it's when the book's attention settles on Robin, finally developed here as a true equal of Strike. There were moments, before, when her character felt thin, tolerating her fiancé's condescension about her job, fretting about whether she might make a career alongside Strike. In fact, as Rowling slowly and masterfully reveals in this novel, redefining a character we thought we'd known, that apparent diffidence stems from a traumatic experience: As an undergraduate, Robin was raped. Suddenly, after three books, we understand why she clings to her irritating boyfriend, and why even modest steps in her career are so crucial to her sense of self-worth. The rape occurred because, as the book heartbreakingly puts it, Robin was "in the wrong stairwell at the wrong time." It's a phrase you could adapt to Cedric Diggory's death, and while "Career of Evil" works superbly as a pure murder mystery, in Robin's development Rowling finds a larger theme, too - the terrible ongoingness and untidiness of life, the ways in which catching a criminal doesn't necessarily finish a crime, only a book. This fresh scope makes for the best novel she has written as Robert Galbraith. It's not Harry Potter; that universe is an irreplicable astonishment. The good news is that its creator evidently has some magic left. CHARLES FINCH'S novel "Home by Nightfall" will be published this month. 'You know four men who'd send you a severed leg?' the detective asks her boss, 'four?'
