I’m a big fan of the Cormoran Strike novels, and so I was very excited for this next installment. Hmmm. I think (as many other reviewers have said) that listening to this as an audiobook was probably not the best way to enjoy it. It is a book set largely in the online world, with many tweets and online forum chats, and the poor narrator had to read out all the hashtags and i.p. addresses and long handles etc that you (or at least I) would just let your eyes skim over if you were reading it. Listening to all those strings of letters and numbers and symbols was excruciating and made me begin to lose the will to live, and I found the book very hard to get into for that reason.
That aside, I mostly really liked it, although overall I’d say less than previous books in the series. I did enjoy more character development of Strike and Robin although the drawn out will-they-won’t-they is beginning to grate on my nerves a little. The narrator was fabulous, and I liked the unfolding of the plot. I kind of half guessed whodunnit quite early on, and was inwardly shouting at Strike and Robin for not seeing what I thought was obvious (I know hind sight is wonderful, and I wasn’t totally right in my workings out) also, I think it’s probably good psychology to let the reader work out some things ahead of the detectives, so we can feel clever.
Of course I will continue buying and reading/listening to the books in this series, and watching the TV adaptations and I read that J.K. Rawlings has a definite end point in mind so things will wrap up nicely eventually, which is good, but also sad because I don’t want it to end!
Sarah Wray Writer 