In The SIlkworm, JKR went baroque and Jacobean with the murder of the case, and accordingly all chapters were headed by a John Webster (and friends) quote. In Career of Evil, where the backstory of Strike’s dead mother, the rock music groupie, is pretty important, the quotes came from Blue Öyster Cult lyrics. This time around, it’s Ibsen’s turn, and if you know your Scandinavian playwrights, you know, with a sinking heart, what this signifies - bad marriages (or bad love affairs) are a big theme of the tale. On the bright side, I hasten to add, the Strike/Robin partnership is in fine shape, both professionally and emotionally, after fallout from the last volume at the start of the novel. And since said partnership is the core of what makes this series of novels, that is the most important thing.

But to get my bad marriages/affairs nitpicks out first: ( which are spoilery. )

All of which, btw, doesn’t mean that various of the depictions of bad relationships didn’t ring true to me. “You can bloody hate someone and still wish they gave a shit about you, and hate yourself for wishing it” one of the suspects tells Robin, which is true for a great many of the novel’s cast, and struck me as a key quote. As for the case(s) of the novel which our investigative team has to crack, one starts when an off-his-meds homeless man shows up at their office and tells Strike about witnessing a murder as a child (which, because he’s clearly mentally ill, means he may or may not have imagined it), the other with a Tory politician, Jasper Chiswell, being blackmailed and in turn wanting to get dirt on his opponent. This provides the opportunity for Robin to go undercover not once but twice in very different roles, which mostly is great fun to read about, and for the author to do what she did in “Cuckoo’s Calling” for the fashion world and in “The Silkworm” for the literary industry, to go satirical about a certain milieu: politics, privileged Tory families and the radical left. The first two work out well (for example, Robin’s acid observation on what the various members of the (Tory) Chiswell clan think of as “poor”), but with the last, I feel it shows that JKR has been spending the last two years or so involved in an inner Labour dispute between Corbynists and, for lack of a better term, Social Democrats in the Labour party, and not on the pro-Corbyn side. Because if one of the supporting villains is a beardy charismatic guy having a cult like grip on his followers while he’s spouting pseudo Marxist clichés which include the occasional antisemitic remark, with an anti-Zionist poster prominently displayed in the locations where he holds a speech, it’s probably not out of this world to suspect someone might be fictionally venting. This unfortunately means the satire is less than successful, because in addition to everything else, the character in question is also a hypocrite, exploiting other people. Letting him have the courage of his convictions would have made for a far more interesting literary creation. (In this very novel, she does better with the actual murderer, who doesn’t have a red arrow saying “dislike this person” pointing at them all the time, and with some of the other supporting cast, including Chiswell’s daughter Izzy, who is clueless about privilege in the most breathtaking way without being malicious, or Chiswell’s political enemy Della who needs to come across as ambigous since what her motives are and how much she knows is one of the mysteries facing Strike and Robin.

This being said, the maybe Corbyn avatar is just a minor villain and doesn’t show up that often, especially in the second half of the novel. And, again, there is great teamwork. Given that the second novel features a major argument between our heroes and the third much plot interference, I can’t tell how how I relieved I was that in this one, after the early holding hack, they get along fine, and as in the first one you can see them bringing out each other’s strengths while having a great rapport, and share many a scene. Most importantly (to me), in the majority of said scenes, they’re comfortable with each other. In a novel which inflicts private drama on either otherwise, this is a much needed relief.

In conclusion: won’t be my favourite of the lot but I’ll probably reread it in some years, skipping over most of the stuff with SPOILER. And celebrate that SPOILER won’t plague us in future novels anymore.

Okay, I had (still have) my doubts about Athos as Cormoran Strike, but this casting is great news! I can definitely see Holiday Grainger as Robin, and since I've loved her as Lucrezia Borgia, I've missed having her on my tv screen in something I like.

Aka the one where JKR unleashes her fondness for 70s hard rock and distaste for serial killers and glamorized bad boys.

Career of Evil is an odd duck for me: on the one hand, it does several things better than in the second novel (imo, as always), on the other, it's missing some of the aspects which the missing made me realise I loved about the two previous ones. For example: on the plus side, whereas Robin isn't really present in the first third of The Silkworm and doesn't really come to the fore until the second half of the novel, here in Career of Evil she really gets the same narrative room as Cormoran Strike does; if anything, I suspect Robin gets more pages. And as I'd hoped, her development as a detective is a big issue.

On the minus side: Cuckoo's Call took on the fashion world, The Silkworm the publishing industry. This was the occasion for some great social comedy (and btw, the publishing industry was depicted as far more vicious than the fashion industry in terms of characters, which is, err, INTERESTING) and hilarious one liners. Career of Evil, otoh, doesn't tackle any industry, but it does tackle abusive relationships, big time. Which not so surprisingly means there isn't any satire or humor in the book, and only by its absence did I realise its presence contributed to the charm of the earlier two. I mean, I totally get why if all of your suspects are abusive, there isn't any opportunity for quips, but it contributes to the dark tone.

Some of the things I expected to happen after the last volume don't (though they still may), such as Cormoran Strike's ex fiancee Charlotte ending up as a victim or a murder suspect; instead, Charlotte isn't in the book at all. Nor is Strike's half brother who got introduced in the last volume. Otoh, we find out more about Strike's mother Leda, who gets fleshed out beyond "groupie, dead, death forming event of son's life" to a real character in retrospect. (And btw, only now it occurs to me that given JKR's penchant for using mythology-related names in a certain other book series, naming her hero's mother "Leda" and having her involved with rock gods probably makes him either Castor or Pollux.) Which is very welcome, and also fitting thematically because mothers are a big issue in the novel: both those of our detecting duo (Robin's mother Linda is great, striking just the perfect balance between being supportive while avoiding being intrusive) and mothers involved with the suspects.

Speaking of whom: at the start of the novel, Robin gets send a human leg to the office, and both Robin and reader learn to their amazement Strike doesn't just have one but FOUR men in his past who could have mailed him such a gruesome parcel. Which means the whodunit aspect of the book is figuring out which of the four it is. The one who never is a serious candidate (and never shows up on page, so to speak) is the one the police suspect most, naturally, a professional gangster. Two of the others are cases from Strike's time in the military police, and the fourth is his dastardly stepfather whom he suspects of having killed his mother. (Who officially died of an heroin overdose, but as Strike's sister Lucy told Robin in the last novel, young Cormoran never believed that.) This makes Strike less than objective when comes to Whittaker (the guy in question), as Robin points out, and of course made me as a reader suspect Whittaker was a red herring as well. Though he and the other two candidates are all equally vile. And all abusive, in various ways. One (Robin's favourite suspect for a while) is a pedophile, the other two are more into hurting women. Which brings me to mothers, the full variety: there's a mother who disowned her son in horror, a mother of one of the abused children who didn't want to know and looked a way, a mother who really didn't know and is behind her child 100% when she finds out in horror, a sister who got to raise her much younger sister (the first victim) as a mother, a mother had her parents raise her kid as her brother. And, like I said, Robin's living and Strike's dead mother, who turns out to have been the defiantly fierce earth mother type picking up strays which sometimes worked out well (one new character we meet is a cheerfull criminal with an undying loyalty to Strike because Leda saved his life when he was a kid on the streets) and sometimes not at all (Whittaker, who started out as Leda's much younger boy toy). She also had some of her favourite Blue Öyster Cult song lyrics tattooed - which provide the titel of the novel as well -, and the fact the limb sending killer quotes them is another reason why Strike suspects Whittaker. Who, two decades down the road, has lost some looks and still has the same lack of personal hygiene (complete with greasy hair, which is a phrase familiar to HP readers, but otoh he also kept his "heretic priest eyes"), which means no more adult women, but young girls, alas, still fall for his bad boy charisma (and the current one ended up pimped and regularly beaten up by him). Why yes, this novel is defnitely an issue fanfic, so to speak. Laing, the other wife abuser, also had his wife (before she got nearly killed by him) declaring he was just misunderstood to her appalled parents. In fairness, the pedophile, otoh, poses as a heroic good guy to the mothers of the children he's after, who definitely aren't drawn to bad boys, but the other two provide the novel with more than enough material for an exasparated venting of the "this is what happens when you go for charismatic jerks in real life" type, with a sideline of "serial killers aren't glamorous intellectuals, they're pathetic misogynistic creeps" .

So much for the criminal case(s) of the novel. On to emotional developments for Our Heroes which I shall hide beneath ( a spoiler cut. )

In conclusion, while I read this novel in two nights, I don't think I enjoyed it as much as the former two for the above named reasons. I also hope this excursion in to the serial killer genre remains the last, and the next case Strike and Robin will tackle will involve murder for financial greed or jealousy or whatever mundane reason again, complete with some social satire.

Trivia: Between Leda Strike being a big Blue Öyster Cult fan, her son still knowing those lyrics at heart and various complimentary descriptions of their music at various points of the novel, as well as their songs providing the lead quotes for every chapter (the way Jacobean revenge dramas did for the last novel), I suspect JKR likes that band as well...