In the 10 years since a debut crime novel entitled The Cuckoo’s Calling was published and its author – Robert Galbraith – revealed to be none other than JK Rowling, the Cormoran Strike books have, like the Harry Potter novels before them, steadily expanded in size. The hardback of 2022’s The Ink Black Heart, sixth in the series, was very nearly twice the length of that first volume, and this year’s offering, The Running Grave, is similarly hefty.
Some judicious trimming wouldn’t have gone amiss – the subplot, about the stalking of a female actor, often seems an impediment to the primary narrative – but it’s worth staying the course for an immersive and, for the most part, riveting read.
As ever, the private detective and his business partner Robin Ellacott’s personal lives are at the fore. The decade-long will they/won’t they romantic suspense shows no sign of being resolved, although Robin is increasingly ill at ease with her police officer boyfriend, and Cormoran’s ill-advised displacement activity with a “man-hungry pain in the arse” named Bijou is threatening to have serious repercussions for him and the agency. His reckless, unbalanced ex-lover, Charlotte, is intensifying her usual emotional blackmail by claiming – perhaps truthfully – to have cancer, and there are family problems to contend with, too. Elderly Uncle Ted, who did his best to protect the young Cormoran and his half-sister Lucy from the consequences of their chaotic mother’s peripatetic lifestyle, is sinking into dementia.
Against a background of all this, plus the 2016 Brexit referendum, is a tale of how the human desire for approval, validation and a sense of purpose can sometimes lead us astray. Sir Colin Edensor, a retired civil servant, approaches the pair with a request to help extricate his vulnerable neurodivergent son from the clutches of a cult. Several years earlier, Will dropped out of university to join the Universal Humanitarian Church. All attempts to dislodge him from its headquarters, a farm in Norfolk, have proved fruitless: Will has now cut off communication with his family, and his trust fund is being systematically drained.
The UHC, which presents as a benign organisation with worthy aims, has a charismatic leader known as Papa J, some high-profile followers, a lot of prime real estate, and expensive lawyers to rebut any claims of indoctrination or ill treatment. Added to which, it’s very difficult to find any former members who will discuss their time at the farm. Those who can be persuaded talk of supernatural happenings, in particular the apparition of the “Drowned Prophet”, believed to be a divine reincarnation of Papa J’s seven-year-old daughter Daiyu, who supposedly disappeared during a dip in the North Sea in 1995.
Robin goes undercover and soon discovers that, despite the chanted slogans about freedom and happiness, both are in very short supply. In a world with no calendars or clocks, let alone wifi, the undernourished disciples, exhausted by back-breaking work, are denied medical assistance if they are ill, routinely coerced into unprotected sex – referred to as “spirit bonding” – and made complicit in various crimes. Forced to agree that “black’s white and up’s down” and fearful of punishment, the participants begin, after a while, to gaslight themselves.
Posing as a rich woman who might make a donation can only provide Robin with so much protection. Before long, she has incurred the wrath of Papa J’s baleful wife, and she’s running out of excuses not to spirit bond. It’s a race against the clock to uncover enough evidence of wrongdoing – not least what really happened to young Daiyu – to persuade Will to return to his family before Robin is rumbled.
With enough jeopardy and tension to overcome the longueurs, and despite the author’s continuing predilection for unnecessary and distracting phonetic dialogue, The Running Grave is testimony to Rowling/Galbraith’s skill as a storyteller. And, as the nights draw in, it’s a pleasure to curl up with two characters who have all the pleasant familiarity of old friends.
• The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith is published by Sphere (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
