Lethal White by Robert Galbraith, review: JK Rowling's new book may be full of twists and turns, but it's bloated

Lethal White, JK Rowling’s fourth outing as Robert Galbraith, takes place in 2012, when Britain was basking in the glory of the Olympics and Paralympics.

But it’s clearly a novel suffused with tensions of now – there is little of that heady summer on the page. Instead, there are corrupt government officials who abuse their power, far-left antisemitic characters and troubled relationships everywhere you turn.

Lethal White picks up where Career of Evil, the last Galbraith novel, ended – at Robin Ellacott’s wedding to Matthew Cunliffe. The action then sprints forward a year – Cormoran Strike’s detective agency is doing well and Robin is back at work, but she and Strike are tiptoeing around each other. Into this comes Billy, a troubled young man who thinks he witnessed a murder as a child, and a government minister seeking information on people who are blackmailing him.

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With this novel, Rowling begins to display signs of following a pattern – it was at the same point in her Harry Potter series that her novels became huge, and at 647 pages (around 150 pages longer than Career of Evil), huge is one word to describe Lethal White. Another is bloated. The central murder of the novel doesn’t occur until page 281, and up until then the book meanders between a myriad of side plots and details that as a reader you know will come together, but that are taking too long to do so.

Rowling has always been good at details – she vividly creates a London inhabited by Strike, his informants and his clients. But occasionally, Rowling stumbles into such gratuitous overwriting that one can’t help but laugh. After being asked if she believes in redemption, we are told that “the question caught Robin by surprise. It had a kind of gravity and beauty, like the gleaming jewel of the chapel at the foot of a winding stair.”

Galbraith’s novels have always been strongest when Robin and Strike are interacting, navigating their complicated feelings for each other while on a case. Unfortunately, for much of the novel they are kept apart. It’s Robin who comes out worse because of this, often seeming a pale (sometimes literally) imitation of the plucky temp-turned-detective from the previous three novels. Here, she is drawn as naive in her marriage, and you can’t help but think that the Robin of the previous books would have dumped the pathetic Matthew by now.

But once she and Strike are properly reunited – questioning family members of the murder victim at a country house in Oxfordshire, tramping through woods together in darkest night, tracking down clues – they become the Strike and Robin we love, and the novel takes on the intrigue and urgency it’s missing for much of the first half. It proves that it’s the characters, not the mystery, that make the Galbraith novels worth reading.

Lethal White is full of twists and turns, and when its many threads come together, it’s exciting and engaging reading. But with a bit of editing, it could have been brilliant reading.

Lethal White by Robert Galbraith is published by Sphere, £20