Regrets about The Ink Black Heart by J.K.Rowling

 

The newest Cormoran Strike detective novel by Robert Galbraith (pseudonym of J.K.Rowling) is The Ink Black Heart. I didn't like it at all. I forced myself to read all 1278 tedious pages, including endless quotations of complicated online interchanges between fictitious avatars in an online game and on Twitter. These were reproduced in minuscule typefaces that had to be enlarged in painful ways on my Kindle reader. Obviously, I don't know if the hardcopy version of the book was easier to read. 

I'm really not inclined to write much about this book. It's the sixth in a series of which I liked the first four, with reservations about one that was too violent. What I wrote about the fifth book, in a review titled A Very Long Book, wasn't very positive: I mentioned my sense that Troubled Blood, book number five, was much too long and involved. 

I liked The Ink Black Heart even less, and the plot and characters -- while sometimes pretty well-portrayed -- are really getting less interesting than in the earlier books. The long relationship of the two main characters, Cormoran Strike and his detective agency partner Robin Ellacot continues throughout this book. After five years they are still pretty much in the same place they started, and at this point I am losing patience and losing interest.

I suspect that many of the situations, character flaws, bad motives, pettiness, internet trolling, male chauvinism and violence, name-calling, nastiness, and other similar parts of the novel are payback for the internet abuse that J.K.Rowling has recently endured. I do feel sorry for her for being castigated in such nasty ways, but I didn't really want to share all this agony. 

I haven't read any reviews of this novel, so I don't know if anyone else shares my chagrin at missing the humor, skillful observation of human relations, great characterizations, and overall delightfulness of J.K.Rowling at her best.

Review © 2022 mae sander