Well, I’m back. My family life took a sad turn in June, and since then I haven’t been doing very much of anything productive, but I’m trying to change that now.

And so we’ve arrived at Career of Evil, the last book I read in 2015. This is the third Cormoran Strike novel by Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling) and I didn’t enjoy it as much as The Silkworm, but just as much as The Cuckoo’s Calling.

A lunatic sends Cormoran’s spunky sidekick (and growing love interest), Robin, a human leg. Just a leg. No body attached, like she had ordered a turkey drumstick. This was the first of several body parts delivered to Robin. Blue Oyster Cult lyrics also arrive with these body parts and feature heavily throughout the book. Strike figures out he knows the killer partially because the killer sends BOC lyrics his mom had as a tattooed on her.

This was a pretty weird mystery that took some pretty wild turns, where the suspect is one of three very shady blokes Cormoran knows from his past including an one of his old boxing adversaries from the army, a pedophile and some other really lousy human being.

They get the right guy at the end, but not before Robin breaks off her wedding, then un-breaks off her wedding, and gets herself fired for disobeying direct orders from her boss, who can barely manage without her because she takes care of all the detailed things he can’t be bothered to think about (like, the mail).

Anyway, after their big blowout, Strike finds himself being driven by one of his childhood friends in low places to Robin’s wedding, where he shows up just in time to see Robin get married, and knock over a big vase of flowers, drawing the attention of the whole church congregation, which makes Robin laugh.

We also find out during the book that Robin was raped in college, which is why she never completed it, and that Matthew, her boyfriend now fiance/husband, had a fling with a friend of his.

At the end of this story, Robin and Strike, while no longer actively arguing and rather glad to see each other, are not actually reconciled and Robin is still fired, so hopefully this is rectified in the next book, because Robin is my favorite character, and I prefer she not be absent for any long length of time.

Now that Robin is married it is also less clear in Robin and Strike are endgame, which is less important but still kind of what I’d like to see happen because Matthew is a douche. Robin needs to get rid of him at the very least.

As I said, I enjoyed this every bit as much as the first Galbraith book, not quite as much as the second, but definitely a lot.

I don’t know how many of these books Rowling Galbraith plans to write, but as long as they remain this good, I’ll keep reading them. She’s released one book a year 2013, 2014, and 2015 in the Strike series so far, but considering it’s nearly September and there’s no release date for the next one yet, it probably won’t be out until 2017 at the earliest, which isn’t the end of the world, but I’d still have liked to have gotten my hands on it this fall.

I’m going to try to update this more frequently again. I haven’t even started writing about my 2016 books yet and it’s getting on 2017. JEEZ.

Tagged: authors: robert galbraith, books: career of evil, genre: mystery