Review: Lethal White

Rating: 3.5 Stars

I think it was a mistake to read this book right after reading Career Of Evil. For one, I kept wanting to read one more page till I realized that I had spent all night reading it, and for another, it was not because of the mystery but because I just wanted it to be over!

First, let’s talk about the thing everyone was waiting for: Robin and Matthew’s wedding, and what happened after Strike managed to reach the church in Career Of Evil. The whole sequence at the beginning of Lethal White left me underwhelmed and disappointed. I expected Robin’s character to grow more mature as we find out more and more about her. The first chapter again made me question how the same woman can be so brave, yet so weak? Then, suddenly we skip a whole year and realize that everything seems to be back at square one, except the agency is doing a tad bit better than in the last book.

The first chapter could have been redeemed if the actual mystery had been anything like the previous three installments. In the previous review, I talked about Robert Galbraith not being one to shy away from violence and gore. Looks like I talked to soon.

The story is not bad, and there is a definite mystery to be solved, but this detective series has suddenly become like an Agatha Christie book, only with long and tedious details that make you want to yawn. The fact that I was able to actually work it all out much sooner than the detectives themselves, was a downer. I just read on to see if my guess was correct.

It all looked really promising in the beginning with a mysterious visitor, and his strange story. I was ready to read something along the lines of The Silkworm. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. I’m still a big fan of murder mysteries, so I won’t say that it was a bad book, just that compared to the earlier books, this was a bit of a letdown. I have really begun to think that Galbraith needs a better editor who has the skills to make the whole plot tighter, and stop it from meandering around too much.

As for the Cormoran-Robin-Matthew relationship, it looks like we will keep going round and round in circles for a while yet. If characters from the past keep turning up at every corner, we can look forward to this whole thing being stretched on for another few books. At least this time the reader wasn’t left hanging with a strange ending!