Summary: When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, Mrs. Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days—as he has done before—and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home.
But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance than his wife realizes. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel were to be published, it would ruin lives—meaning that there are a lot of people who might want him silenced.
When Quine is found brutally murdered under bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike any Strike has encountered before...
Thoughts: I don't usually review books I haven't finished but you're all going to get two of those before the week is out.
Despite not finishing it I got far enough to say that the characters were interesting and the plot had me intrigued. The slow build-up of the mystery was masterful and fascinating. The author, Robert Galbraith, is actually J. K. Rowling's pseudonym. So you know the writing was good.
The problem was that it was also so dirty. It felt as though Rowling, in effort to ensure she was writing adult books, overcompensated and made then unfriendly to all ages. Rampant references to sex, every curse word out there, and plenty mentions or insertions of bathroom use that were, frankly, unnecessary.
Again, the leading cast and surrounding characters coupled with the mystery were great and I was sad to put this one down but I couldn't justify all the excess in problematic content.
Content: Please realize that this content review is incomplete due to the fact that I didn't finish the book. Several mentions of considering sex or F***ing a woman. That word, F***, plus just about every other curse word in existence is used frequently but F was the favorite. Mentions of violence and some dirty imagery.
All in all, though I was sorry to have to put it down, this is not a clean read and certainly not worth the trouble.
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