Bearing in mind that this is the first crime book I’ve read aside from Steven King’s Bill Hodges trilogy, I found I had to force myself through a lot of this book.

I struggled with:

- the overly-formal style

- the danger we were promised in the blurb only actually happened in the last ten pages. I kept waiting for that part of the story to kick in.

- the third person omniscient perspective was off-putting to me. Sometimes we were in Strike’s head and sometimes in Robin’s. Even though we were given her perspective and thoughts on occasion, it seemed cursory because we were never given any fleshed-out scenes of Robin doing her own investigations.

- page after page of question/answer interviews. I think the book could have been a good 50 pages shorter.

What kept me reading:

- Strike’s and Robin’s developing work relationship. I found this far more interesting than the investigation a lot of the time.

- the tidbits about Robin’s relationship. I might not read the rest of the series but I suspect Matthew will be given his marching orders because JK seems to have set him up to be a two-dimensional antagonist.

- after Strike’s meeting with Rochelle, I genuinely wanted to know who the killer was.

- I hate not finishing books, otherwise I might have put it down for good. This is certainly the longest I’ve ever spent reading a book of this length.