Play Book Tag discussion

Strike and Robin are visited by a mentally disturbed man who insists he saw a child being killed long ago, and then runs away when the police are called. Shortly after, they are hired by a government minister to investigate who is blackmailing him about a past transgression that he will not name. Amid all this, Robin tries to keep her fledgling marriage together while falling out of love with her husband, and struggles to keep Strike from finding out about her panic attacks, the result of nearly being killed in the previous book, because she is fearful about losing her job.

I have never found an author who can weave such a tangled web and then tease it all together for the reader in such a compelling way, blindsiding you with the ending that you just don't see coming. Rowling is astounding, each book in this series just keeps getting better. My actual rating is 4.5 stars, but I will grudgingly round up, despite my annoyance at the way she keeps Robin acting like such an idiot about her asshole of a husband. That she started the book with the wedding absolutely enraged me as I couldn't believe Robin would be so stupid as to hitch herself to Matthew after all he'd already done (yes, I understand many women do this for the very same reasons, but still!). The motives she gave for Robin doing so were whisper-thin, and I only went along because it's a major flaw that keeps her from being too much of a goody-two shoes character, and because she wises up by the end. I can see why Rowling wanted to have that conflict for the character to work through, but it skirts perilously close to being blatantly contrived, as it has since the beginning. I'm glad she can finally move forward, and am eagerly awaiting the next book.