Lethal White by Robert Galbraith

Mulholland Books, 656 pages, $29

Oy! Robert Galbraith — such as he is — packs a lot of stories into his 656 pages. As the traveler’s maxim goes: Pack your suitcase, throw out half of your stuff, then repack the suitcase. About a quarter of the book is romance related — stuff that would have outed supposed former military police officer Robert Galbraith as a fraud, even if the infelicitous murmurings of the wife of one of J. K. Rowling’s agents hadn’t. To wit, will they or won’t they? They, meaning London private eye Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, his partner who seems more employee-like in every book. “Lethal White” is the fourth in the series.

These things don’t change. Cormoran and Robin yearn and burn for each other. Cormoran’s stump aches in his prosthetic device, making him seem more vulnerable and human. As we know from her other writings, Rowling is capable of conjuring up the best villains. This is given rein in Robin’s nasty lump of a husband, Matthew. (Boo, hiss.) 

Rowling's job is to build a mystery plot around that continuing soap opera. In this case, a young disturbed man enters the detective agency and declares he needs their help to find the body of a child he saw buried when he himself was a child. This young man, Billy, then disappears. Intrigued, Cormoran tracks down Billy’s much older brother, Jimmy, now a socialist radical trying to marshal other radicals.

Somewhere along the line the agency also books a case of blackmail against a government minister, Jasper Chiswell (pronounced Chizzle, of course, because ... Britain). He and his dysfunctional family of Izzy, Fizzy, Rancid, Kinvara, and Torks provide a convoluted history that needs unraveling before any headway can be made into the story of why Jasper is being blackmailed. (The twee names are so Rowling.)

Is it any surprise that all of the stories are nestled together like snakes in a pit? Who is the child buried under the nettle-filled hill? Why is Jasper being blackmailed? Why is Raphael (aka “Rancid”) so disliked? Who is/are the person/people skulking around Kinvara's horses? Why is Billy mentally disturbed? Who is Venetia? Actually, I can answer the last question. Venetia is Robin. She uses her middle name to go undercover, and that brings us to the last questions: Why does Venetia need to go undercover and is she any bloody good at it?

“Lethal White” is too long. Perhaps Rowling wants to be sure we get our money’s worth; after all, the book is listed at $29USD. Maybe she is just used to producing ever longer books and can’t stop. I wasn’t overjoyed with the solution to the blackmail case, which eventually became a murder case. There was a mostly gratuitous scene in which the police embraced Cormoran and Robin that didn’t quite ring true, despite Cormoran’s enhanced standing with the police resulting from his solution of the Shacklewell Ripper case (“Career of Evil”).

But I enjoy these books and watching Rowling spread her adult wings, no longer constrained by the rules of writing children’s books.