This is indeed the most exciting and interesting volume in the series! As usual, he excels through investigative work by Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott. Several interesting, smaller cases keep the employees of the detective agency busy and yet Robin and Cormoran accept an unusually large case that was 40 years ago and the chances of solving it are slim.
In a calm narrative pace, not much happens on the first 600 pages, and yet quite a bit. I had great reading fun to learn more about the smaller cases as well as about the investigators employed. So far, they are all male and very different. Robin doesn’t get on with everyone equally well, especially the macho behavior and the advances of Morris get on her nerves.
The office is run by Pat, who does her job very well but doesn’t get along very well with Cormoran on a human level. He’s also, unexpectedly, quite grumpy with her. Why this is so will be understood later.
The long ago cold case that the two partners Robin and Cormoran are working on is very tricky. Old police records are confused and incomprehensible because the chief investigator had drifted into the occult and tried to solve the case using zodiac signs and tarot cards. Robin and Cormoran have great difficulty deciphering the meanings of the police investigator.
The closer it gets to the end, the cold case becomes more and more exciting. It becomes particularly clear how positively Robin has developed as a private detective. She is brave and dares to gather evidence in her own way, without Cormoran knowing about it.
The storyline, which deals with Robin’s and Cormoran’s personal level, also evolves and never drifts into kitsch. It traces life wonderfully, as we all have certainly experienced it ourselves and thus remains exciting!
I have one small criticism regarding the translation, because unfortunately this time I noticed that three different translators had worked on this work. In particular, the first quarter was linguistically not so fluent. The linguistic style was a bit bumpy and disturbed my reading flow. Fortunately, this went away again, so I didn’t include this little criticism in my rating.
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