Beer, Brexit & Big Ben

J.K. ROWLING — ROBERT GALBRAITH — TROUBLED BLOOD — 2020

This is the fifth volume of the Strike Novels centered on Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott confronted to several cases, two of them finding some closure with the localization and discovery of the bodies of two women assassinated, murdered would be an understatement, some forty years before. The action is situated in Cameron’s England with the Scottish referendum for independence in the UK background, but also with the rising desire for independence, or at least a lot more devolution, among communities like the Cornish Celts or the Scottish Nationalists. Wales is not very much present and Northern Ireland or Ireland, in general, is not at all. It is heavily centered onto England, London for the two murders, but a lot on northern England, Yorkshire particularly, for Robin Ellacott, and Cornwall for Cormoran Strike. Surprising enough other Europeans are rather very limited in this book, and in London. Apart from a few Italians who are the local Mafiosi gangsters, there are very few Europeans. The most prominent foreign family in the novel is the Bayliss family from the Indian subcontinent but in no way qualified religiously. The main case is centered on Saint John’s medical practice. Three doctors altogether. Dr. Dinesh Gupta from India, Dr. Joseph Brenner from Germany and a survivor of the Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp, and Dr. Margot Bamborough, a real grassroot English woman.

This last doctor is the center of the novel since she disappeared without leaving any trace at all behind her forty years ago. Her daughter hires, with her life partner Kim Sullivan, a BPS registered psychologist, Strike and Robin to find out what happened since at the time two successive police investigators led to no solution and left behind a very cold case. The second case, that of the Tucker daughter who disappeared in the same period is seen as one more murder, after kidnapping, detaining, and torturing, attributed to the famous serial killer Dennis Creed though it was never proved, and the body had never been found. The two cases will be eventually solved and the bodies recovered. But you have to read this monstrous…