Reviews with content warning for Transphobia - Troubled Blood

Rowling is a bigot, a seriously committed transphobe, and this book contains all sorts of weird and bad examples of her worst impulses as an author. “But there are no trans characters!” you may protest; true, but the transphobia and gender-essentialism are on clear display throughout. There are too many examples to list.

I was willing to set aside her beliefs and be entertained by a decent mystery novel. That’s already more credit than she deserves. I had already read the first four books and liked them well enough. But this book sucks. It is way, way too long; the central mystery is by far the least interesting in the series so far; the characters outside of the two leads are at best unlikeable; and prolonging deeper communication or romance between Strike and Robin is tiring by now. Easily the worst book I have read in recent memory.

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cathyrodgers's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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samanthaxe's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I picked up this book because JK Rowling is a master plotter, and I continue to love the dynamic between Strike and Robin. As with past books, the interaction between the two of them was the best part. The story is a little convoluted--the agency is now very busy, with multiple cases going on at once, and it's hard to follow all of those details as well as the main mystery of Margot Bamborough. I enjoyed the astrology subplot, but was ultimately too confused by it to see how it impacted the ending or solving of the case.

I was also wondering whether Rowling would use this opportunity to make a statement about trans people, and she does.

One of the main suspects, a man, dresses as a woman in order to gain the trust of his female victims and enter their spaces.

While Rowling does not use the word trans or identify this character as trans, she's obviously trying to spin a story where the fears she spouts on Twitter are manifest, however unrealistic or unfounded. There are also several conversations between characters where Robin or Strike think about the naïveté of young people and their desire to control the narrative and language around their experience, and how ultimately that doesn't change anything.

So, trigger warnings for what you'd expect in a gritty thriller, with an emphasis on almost unrelenting violence against women, and I'd also add a trigger warning for Rowling's seemingly benign use of things like cross-dressing to make an insidious and harmful point about gender identity.

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sefkhet's review against another edition

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slow-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

Right, I own this because I'd paid for it on pre-order before JKR showed her transphobic ass to the degree she has done lately. I've offset this as much as I can by donating double the cost of the book to Mermaids.

I have read the whole thing, and I can say with confidence that it did not need to be 927 pages long. Indeed, I have tagged what otherwise would be a fairly fast-paced book as slow-paced because it did not need to be 927 pages long.

I will also say up front that the best character in the whole book is Wolfgang, the dog.

I've given it two stars because I like Strike and Robin, and because I think this has the fundamental building blocks of a story that would have been great in the hands of a different writer. I've liked Strike and Robin since The Cuckoo's Calling, which I read before anyone knew who Robert Galbraith was. I was pleased when Robin got shot of Matthew midway through Lethal White (not least because three and a half books is quite long enough for any woman to haul a plot device around as if it's a small grenade), and although Robin's character development in this book is fairly predictable, it isn't entirely bad.

On the other hand, the regression of a number of the other long-standing women characters in the book in support of Robin's character development is teeth-grindingly awful. So far as Strike is concerned, Robin's chief asset has always been that she is Not Like Other Women, and that is a casually misogynist viewpoint that I'll forgive Strike on the grounds that the main person he tends to be comparing her to is his ex-fiancee. In the previous books, I've had no difficulty reading it as Strike's viewpoint, mainly because the previous books have featured women in the supporting cast who have not been written as stereotypes or as foils for Robin. Ilsa, Vanessa, and Linda have sacrificed their personalities in this book and I don't even know why.

The narrative is filled with casual bigotry -- against women, against fat people, against women of colour, against people with regional accents. The narrative is in third-person omniscient, so take from that what you will. When the narrative in the later Harry Potter books was full of holes, we forgave it because it was written from the point of view of a canonically oblivious teenage boy. She doesn't have that excuse here.

The transphobic dogwhistle of an A-plot that was the subject of so much of the advance publicity is pointless, given that it's entirely about the dangers of cisgender men rather than trans women. (I suspect the author sees neither the irony nor the nuance.) It didn't need to be included, and the story itself would have lost nothing at all and would have needed to be changed not at all if it had never been mentioned.

And in the end, after spending half of the book and what feels like half my life on it, it isn't even the A-plot.

And that's without getting into the factual errors, the continuity errors, and the pages upon pages of fully transcribed interviews full of ellipses and difficult-to-read phonetically-spelled regional accents that just aren't needed.

The really disappointing thing is that the resolution to the murder is actually well set up and satisfying and creepy, but by the time we got to it I'm not sure I cared anymore. Also,

for a series that is so quick to armchair diagnose psychosis, we definitely skip over the fact that even the most disinterested of armchair diagnosticians would have recognised that at least part of -- by no means all of, but still -- the murderer's motive is that she has Munchausen's by proxy.

I find myself wondering what the BBC might do with this, when they get there. There's a lot of scope for them to tell it better.

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