Career of Evil

Striking Back

By now everyone knows Robert Galbraith is J.K. Rowling’s pseudonym—presumably when she gets sick of writing about her famous boy wizard, she thinks seriously about a one-legged war veteran, who runs a detective agency.

Cormoran Strike is not the garden variety gumshoe—he has an interesting back story and a complicated love life. He is the son of a rock star and a doped out groupie. His hippie mother raised him and his half siblings in a slapdash way and was possibly murdered by her latest toy-boy husband when Strike was a boy. That man, Whittaker makes an appearance to mock and torment, in Career of Evil, the third Cormoran Strike book after The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm.

In the first book, Strike had hired smart and pretty Robin Ellacott as his assistant; by the end of the book, she was promoted to partner. Their relationship has a strange push-pull quality—they deny the powerful attraction they feel for each other, by trying extra hard to keep it all strictly professional. Robin has a fiancé, Matthew, who hates Strike and is jealous of him. The feeling is reciprocated by Strike. In every book, while mysteries are solved, these complicated matters of the mind and heart are also being coped with.

 When Career of Evil begins (after a grisly prologue), a female leg is delivered to Robin, accompanied by a note quoting Blue Öyster Cult (lyrics by the band begin each chapter) — a reference to Strike’s mother, which only he gets. Robin is understandably horrified, but it is soon clear that a pervert serial killer is on the loose, who enjoys mutilating the women he kills. The reader is made privy to the fact that the killer wants to destroy Strike, by targeting Robin. If the whiff of such fiendish events hovers over Strike business, and he is unable to protect his own partner, who will ever hire him?

Like in the first book, Strike is pushed to the brink of professional and financial disaster and he has to find the killer even as the cops blunder around. He knows that the murderer knows him and has some old revenge motive. Strike and Robin have to trace the possible suspects and investigate the how and why, before more women, and Robin, become victims of the lunatic’s carving knife.

Galbraith has written a chilling book and also gone into the dark world pedophilia and of people with body integrity identity disorder — “the irrational desire for the removal of a healthy body part”—that might give many readers nightmares. To help him, Strike has just a scarred and scary-looking childhood buddy, Shanker, who surfaces from some criminal netherworld when summoned--as loyal as he is mercenary. 

More is revealed about the past of Strike and Robin—she is still fighting demons of an old trauma, that does not allow herself to be as emotionally open with Matthew as would like her to be. She and her sympathetic parents are preparing for Robin’s wedding with Matthew when this horrible case comes up and strains her already problematic relationship with Matthew. 

From idyllic towns to sordid strip joints—the search for the psychopath takes Strike and Robin all over the place, courting danger and risking heartbreak. The big, burly, hairy Cormoran Strike, who refuses to let the loss of his leg handicap him, is one hell of a hero, and Robin a perfect foil. They are made for each other—at least at work.  And the wait will be on for the next part of their story—the cases will get solved anyway.

Career Of Evil

By Robert Galbraith

Publisher: Mulholland

Pages: 497