The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

The Good – This is another engrossing novel by JK Rowling. She develops her characters slowly over time and spanning across novels and it makes you want to keep reading more. I honestly wasn’t even close until the end on guessing who the bad guy was. I usually am very good at knowing, but this time I think the character development intrigued me far more than trying to figure out the who done it.

The Bad – The book felt a bit disjointed in following the three different suspects. I imagine that is probably how the investigation would feel as well. The disjointed feeling made for some difficult patches of reading, but nothing terrible. I think if I would have had more long reading sessions it wouldn’t have felt that way at all, but I read this is short bursts.

The Ugly – It seems as we progress through the books, Rowling gets much darker. In the earlier books, many things are left to innuendo, but in this book there are actual acts described. I am curious to see how the next book is because this is out of my comfort zone. While most of the time, the description is necessary to understand the darkness of the characters that Strike is dealing with, there are parts that I found unnecesary. Pretty sure I don’t need to state anymore that these books are not for kids or teens, strictly adult content here.

I also wonder if this is a result of her growth as an author. She is stretching away from the Harry Potter books and into adult literature and it took her time to warm up to that level of writing? I don’t know, those are kind of thoughts on her as an author, not necessarily about this book.

Second aside – I started rewatching the series on HBO/Max. I really enjoyed it the first time through, now with the books under my belt, it is even better.