This book is long! The length of the books seems to increase according to the position of the book in the series (i.e. the seventh is longer than the sixth that is longer than the fifth, etc); one wonders whether this length is justified. As opposed to books by Tom Clancy that could easily be trimmed by 30%, there is very little fat on this book. A great deal of the book is devoted to Robin's undercover stay; there's the secondary plot of the stalked actress - this is necessary as the actress plays an important part in a later section of the story.
Then we have the backdrop of mainly Strike's personal life - his uncle, his long time ex-girlfriend, his current very problematic squeeze and of course the will they/won't they sexual tension between Strike and Robin, ending the book with a broad wink to all shippers. Probably the sub-sub-plot of competition with a rival agency could have been dropped entirely without interfering too much, but on the other hand, this adds verisimilitude in that in real life one has to deal all the time with multiple issues that have no connection between each other but take up time and mental space.
Certainly the brief mentions of Brexit are fairly irrelevant; whilst this is a huge issue for Britain in 2016, it has absolutely nothing to do with the book. Other real time political events have not been mentioned in any of the other books* so this one seems slightly jarring, especially as Strike has no view whatsoever on the topic (it certainly doesn't affect his business).
One thing that eludes me is understanding the motivation of the UHC elders. Maybe I missed something (and I read the book carefully for the second time), but this seems to be lacking. Yes, "Papa J" can have sex with multiple partners including underage females, and yes, his wife seems to be a total sadist, but this doesn't seem to be sufficient to justify the creation of their "church" and the lengths that they go to in order to hide as much as possible. There is also very little mention of the good that UHC apparently does to justify its public side: there are mentioned various shelters for homeless people and drug addicts but this isn't gone into very deeply.
* Rereading an earlier Strike book, Career of evil, I see that this statement is untrue. Here we have a royal wedding and the killing of Osama bin Laden. The royal wedding (Kate and William) is a distorted mirror image of the disintegrating relationship between Robin and her then fiancé.
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1348 | PrioXRef 3 - insert without parameters | Programming | |
| 1538 | Indexing blogs | Programming, Meta-blogging |
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