![]() ![]() My friends in Canada have been able to access it through the Canadian version of HBO.) Cannily adapted by Ben Richards ( The Cuckoo’s Calling only) and Tom Edge and directed by Michael Keillor, Kieron Hawkes, Charles Sturridge and Sue Tully, the series is handsomely shot by five different cinematographers and retains Rowling’s focus on character without shortchanging the suspense and scrumptious plot revelations. (The first season, which includes three episodes of The Cuckoo’s Calling and two each of The Silkworm and Career of Evil, is also available on Prime, but if you want to move on to Lethal White you’ll need a subscription to HBO Max. Strike on HBO Max, which first appeared in 2017. If you love a mystery series that winds up on TV, pray that the dramatization is as classy as C.B. The remnant of the rape in her history is a series of panic attacks (in the third book, Career of Evil, and in Lethal White) that she manages to conceal from Matthew and, for a surprisingly long time – considering the dangerous corners she finds herself in during her work life – from Strike as well. In the first four Strike novels the mismatched relationship of Robin and Matthew plays out in the background and sometimes (especially in the fourth, Lethal White) the foreground. And he dislikes Cormoran, whom he sees as a romantic rival, though so far he and Robin have managed to repress what any reader can see is a strong emotional and sexual chemistry. But her fiancé, Matthew Cunliffe, doesn’t like the peril that comes with the job – or, as it happens, the independence. Robin also left university, after she was raped she’d been studying psychology and always aspired to the career that she lucks into when she lands in Strike’s office. As if that isn’t enough emotional baggage, he had a decade-and-a-half-long, on-and-off romance with a beautiful, manipulative, destructive socialite, Charlotte Campbell, who steadfastly refuses to drop entirely out of his life. (It was ruled a self-induced, possibly accidental, drug overdose.) He dropped out of Oxford and joined the army, losing a leg in Afghanistan. (I’ve never been big on Agatha Christie’s mysteries, and I generally find contemporary American crime books grim and humorless.) Strike, who has a rugby player’s frame, is the illegitimate son of a rock star who never made any attempt to act as his father and a hippie model whose second husband, Strike is convinced, was responsible for her death. ![]() Of all the homicide cops and P.I.s whose adventures I’ve followed happily through the years – Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Josephine Tey’s Alan Grant, Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford, and (ongoing) Peter Robinson’s DCI Alan Banks and his sometime paramour DI Annie Cabbot – Strike and Robin are easily the most complicated. In the course of solving the crime, the killing of a famous model that the cops have dismissed as a suicide, both Strike and Robin herself discover her gift for investigation and by the end of the novel he’s agreed to make her his partner. ![]() Her heroes, Strike and Robin Ellacott, run a successful London detective agency, though she starts, in The Cuckoo’s Calling, as a temp who gets a gig at Strike’s ragtaggle business. She’s written five the latest, Troubled Blood, came out last September. (She uses a nom de plume for these books, Robert Galbraith, but the beans were spilled after the first one was published.) As fans of the Harry Potter books might have expected, they’re intricately plotted, with wide-ranging, sharply drawn characters, and you wrap yourself up in them once I start one I have to stave off the impulse to do absolutely nothing else until it’s done but turn the pages. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike detective novels at the beginning of the series, The Cuckoo’s Calling, which she published in 2013.
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