Cultural Dessert

'The Ink Black Heart' by Robert Galbraith

9 December 2022

I have been enjoying ‘The Ink Black Heart’ - the sixth Cormoran Strike detective novel by J K Rowling (writing as Robert Galbraith) - which I am reading as an unabridged audio book, narrated by Robert Glenister. Like the Harry Potter series, the Strike novels seem to be getting longer and longer: the audio version of ‘The Ink Black Heart’ lasts nearly 33 hours. This feels too long - it would definitely have benefited from an edit - but it is an enjoyable and intriguing crime thriller. This time Strike and his partner Robin Ellacott enter the world of online gaming, YouTube and Twitter. Some of the chatroom conversations are a bit tedious to listen to as an audio book, with every @ and # pedantically read out, and the extensive cast of suspects is multiplied by their online pseudonyms. But it’s an engaging puzzle. I think I now actually look forward to spotting J K Rowling’s odd misunderstandings of budget hotels (see my review here of the previous Strike novel, ‘Troubled Blood’, in January 2021). The descriptive writing is often a bit clunky, and some of the online terminology also feels slightly suspect: does anyone refer to their “Instagram page”? But the best tribute I can pay to ‘The Ink Black Heart’ is that I have 3 hours left to listen to but I decided not to rush through it at high speed in order to write this review!

Labels: Books

posted by Robin Simpson @ 12:59 pm