*Spoilers spoilers spoilers* the running grave spoilers thread.. (Content warning - mentions suicide)

[EggTheParrot]

Just as the title says really.. spoilers ok in this thread. Let's keep the other one spoiler free??

Oh my god why is Robyn going undercover!

I don't think it's at all a spoiler to say because she's brilliant and brave and compassionate and utterly fixated on the truth. It does seem a tremendously risky step to take for someone with her history and yet you can see how that history makes her want to do it.

Marking my place, currently on chapter 45.

Robin undercover is making me very tense.

But her and strike are very sweet in this one.

My prediction is, later on, Ryan is suddenly going to turn and Strike will step in and save the day.

Enjoyed the book- especially the very end- but found it darker and more depressing than previous books. And was finding my heart was beating for Robyn at times!!

*Robin

It is way way darker!

Was pleased with Mumsnet hat tip and also the whole safeguarding being overlooked because of “over-correction”. But feel quite sad after reading it.

@ChillinwiththeVillains Yes I love the ending, though it does mean I really really want to read the next book already! I have to say for a book mostly dominated by Robin, Cormoran goes on a pretty major internal journey through the book - so self-destructively rash towards the beginning, and yet has really started to turn it round at the end. Despite everything Robin goes through she doesn't seem to change anything like as much.

I loved reading more about Pat and her family too, such a great character.

I know what you mean about it being dark but there is some sunshine at the end - clouded but almost more special for that. My heart does break for Will's mum though, just can't imagine the pain of losing your son through being rejected by him like that.

Definitely thought Philippa and Amelia were good illustrations of sibling disenchantment vs Strike and Lucy who I think are developing and maturing. Agree that Strike has grown up alot in this book. I think Robin managing to stay together in such an awful environment was a real achievement.
Also is the series equal opps when it comes to wrong uns? So Abigail in this book, Janice the nurse in Troubled Blood. I think still more bad men than women in the books?

Just tallying
CC - man
SW - woman
CoE - man
LW - man (lead) and woman
TB - woman (with a male serial killer in the background)
IBH - man
RG - man and woman (lead)

Slightly more men but definitely more female killers than crime statistics would suggest is typical. A lot of male violence generally though.

OK, not spoiler related but wtf is a "partners desk"? Google gives me nothing useful. Is it a u-shaped desk so they have a side each? A giant, heavy wooden thing with gren leather top that they take turns in? Or just something at which the partners sit? It confuses me every time it's mentioned, which is frankly an unnecessary amount! (In all other respects JKR is Queen)

It's a desk with 6 drawers on either side of where you sit and then opposite you someone else can sit and they also have 6 drawers either side and a normal desk space in front of them

Oh, thanks, Eggtheparrot, I'd only managed to find pics of half of that set up, so a desk for a single partner, in heavy wood with the leather top. A desk like that seems way too big for their office now 😕

And it would bother me less if it was just called the/their desk. Small grumble but it does bug me whenever it's mentioned which is a lot

Yeah it's a bit Ott with the desk thing.. maybe the office had an expansion charm put on it 😂

😂

Oof, so thoughts - much tenser, darker. Real foreboding for a lot of it (Robin at the farm of course but also for a bit when I thought Strike would get Bijou pregnant, when the agency was threatened, and when Robin questioned by the police ).

Loved the “only one bed” scene which made me wonder if JKR reads all the fanfiction!

Loved Strike’s certainty/resolve at the end. And Robin’s reflection at the end about Matthew and their relationship made me want to shout DON’T DO IT AGAIN THEN!

Not sure I’ll be able to bear the wait for the next one to find out what happens

That was bloody brilliant.

I was convinced that the Italian gangsters (Troubled Blood, Irene Conti/ the nursing home) had found them when they were shot. Still wondering if that is going to come up again. And thank you for the villain tally up by sex @UnaOfStormhold

Yes the ever-expanding office does niggle at me slightly - I guess they spend a lot of time out and about but with 6 people there it would be seriously cramped. Unless they expanded when the place got bombed in IBH!

And yes to the tension - I thought it was pretty unbearable while she was in the farm but in a way the unpredictability of the threat afterwards was worse.

I had such high expectations, and they were more than met. I’ve been listening to a lot of cult podcasts, especially about NXIVM to make sense of the behaviour I’ve seen from people involved in gender ideology, and I found a lot of that in RG.
Apologies to talk about myself rather than the book here, but I really want to share my reaction to the book from a personal perspective, as I found it very moving. - The main things that I’ve been grappling with in the gender stuff is the use of self harm and suicide threats to manipulate people. Having experienced that one-on-one it’s what made me see that the same dynamics were at play on a larger scale. All the dots I’ve been joining are made into a story in the book in a way that makes sense, but also takes a really helpful ethical stance on it. My own ‘Charlotte’ died in a remarkably similar way, ruining so many lives with guilt, demanding to be saved over and over again in ways that bled everyone else dry. I even had an eerily similar conversation with his sibling to the one Strike has in the book. It’s such a complex thing to attempt to explain to people, so I usually don’t. To see that situation laid out so beautifully and clearly in the book, at the personal level and at the institutional level, was really cathartic. I was responsible, in the same way that Strike was, for not saving someone who I had loved. I didn’t feel guilty but thought that was because I’d killed off a caring loving part of myself. But seeing Strike’s attitude to the cult case and to his personal situation gives me a different way of seeing it. He retains his humanity, completely. Once you are involved to a certain degree with a person or group that uses those tactics, you can’t neatly and painlessly back out. You have to follow honesty and integrity through a whole load of mess and suffering, not all of it your own. Bit the only alternative is collusion and losing your sense of self and reality, and therefore of being able to act in the world. Virtue ethics not the utopian faux utilitarianism of the cult. Very I Ching.

I have other thoughts, especially around the different types of culpability and complicity, but this is too long already!

Possibly because it’s pushed all of my buttons I’m also left with such strong feelings of love and respect for JKR, I know that sounds ridiculously gushing, but my god that woman is a role model! The integrity, wisdom and compassion that she has is really quite something, in the face of everything that she deals with. And the writing skills, she writes so skilfully but with such a light and unpretentious touch! I’m usually very anti making heroes of people, but I can’t help it in this case.

@ShedHermit unmumsnetty hugs. As someone who hasn't been through anything remotely as difficult as that, I was still very struck by the parallels being drawn between the different sorts of manipulation and self-deception that come up; they struck me as so wise about human nature so I hope the new perspective brought you some ease. It's such a rich book isn't it - from darkness to genuine redemption, with a generous sprinkling of visions of hairy arses and boyfriends who "can't be that funny".

@ShedHermit I'm so sorry you went through that. You absolutely are not responsible xx

@UnaOfStormhold @EggTheParrot thanks both, yes the book’s wisdom feels therapeutic - haven’t felt so understood by a book since I was a teenager seeking the meaning of life in Hermann Hesse books!

It really is a rich book, even more so than Troubled Blood. And yes plenty of lighter and shippier moments - I’d managed to forget the imagined hairy arse… I did read the last few pages about ten times in a row just swooning though.