I couldn’t read about this character without being jolted out of the book.
Seen in the context of Rowling’s expressed views, this character stops the reader cold he seems inserted as if to prove a point. There are no transgender characters in Troubled Blood, but there is a vicious, psychopathic serial rapist/killer who dresses in women’s clothing in order to prey on female victims. Troubled Blood is a deeply frustrating and ultimately unpleasant experience, for reasons having to do with both Rowling’s recent public opinions and with the book itself. She needn’t, for a second, try to write about things she doesn’t understand and doesn’t care about - unless, of course, she wants to become an artist focused on humanity as a whole, including the people she’s prone to misrepresent. Perhaps Rowling should divorce herself from Robert Galbraith, divorce her writing from murder mysteries, and dig deep instead into the things that really matter to her: women (or at least cisgender women) and children. Does Rowling want to write an interconnected series along the lines of Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley books? If so, she could dispense with the caricatured witnesses and focus on Strike and Ellacott’s relationship, which is truly knotty.
endless pages are clouded by ambivalence. It’s her treatment of most any character Strike and Ellacott meet as they seek the truth about Dr. the real abomination in Rowling’s writing is not her treatment of a trans character, at least not in this book. It’s the characterizations, however, that sink the story and for the opposite reason: They lack the texture of reality. That might be why what could have been a suspenseful mystery congeals into a 900-odd page slog. Galbraith/Rowling spends far too much time on the inner workings of office birthday gifts and the inner workings of almost everything else, from the types of biscuits served in witnesses’ homes to Ellacott’s feelings about her brothers’ friends these are not details that move the plot along. dismaying is that the cross-dressing psychopath is among the least egregious stereotypes in this deeply troubled new entry in the Cormoran Strike series.
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