*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!

In similar vein, did anyone else retrospectively wince at the agency 'putting an axe through the legend of the Drowned Prophet'?

Oooh, good spot!

I have found my people! Really wanted to savour this book but could not put it down, possibly my favourite in the series so far.

This is the first one I found scary to the point I struggled to fall asleep when my husband wasn’t home. Everything about the cult was just so eery and unsettling, couldn’t relax until Robin was out.

Love Pat and love that she was included more in this book.

I was shouting into the book for them to declare their love to each other when I finally put it down. Come on JKR I’m desperate!

Also, I feel like I’m a child/teenager again reading the Harry Potter books and being absolutely obsessed. Thank you JKR for giving us another universe to get lost it ✨

Oops, this was the thread I meant to join. Well Jo, you did it again. Brilliant. I need some time to think about the themes a bit, but it was terrific. I fancy Strike.

But did anyone else struggle a bit to keep track of who was who, how they'd found each person and how they'd found out information they put to each person? I couldn't keep it all in my head.

I really enjoyed this book too - I just finished it today.

BUT, parts of it were so overly written. It was too long and personally I got a bit lost with the vast array of characters. If I read it again I think I'll have to make notes!

It was so tense in parts and the revelation about baby trafficking was horrifying. I thought the portrayal of the cult at the farm seemed very realistic and did a good job of explaining the psychology of it.

I really hope they get together in the next book - and that it's a few hundred pages shorter!

My favourite so far has been Troubled Blood and my least fave, IBH which I didn't manage to finish.

I found it a bit surprising that they didn't really dwell on the baby trafficking. Surely that would be the bit that would bring down the church, rather than finding out that a random church member who wasn't a leader unofficially killed another church member (albeit horrifically)?

I suppose it's about bringing it down in the eyes of the public vs in the eyes of the brainwashed cult members. Both would be required.

I think to bring down the church from within, i.e. challenge its orthodoxy with the poor brainwashed cult members, dismantling the myth of Daiyu was probably more important.

Destroying the church by exposing its criminality is how you kill it from the outside - shatter that 'oh they're just harmless lunatics' feeling that had allowed them to carry on abusing their members for so long. The cult members would have excused the baby trafficking as merely ensuring the babies were well cared for/the mothers were able to get back to work.

I found the baby trafficking plot line the least plausible in an otherwise terrifyingly plausible story. There is zero chance that after several decades and hundreds of mothers who have had their babies removed, that not a single one went to the authorities. People did leave the cult. Some of these would have been mothers who could medically prove they had given birth and some of them would have eventually gone to the authorities. Mothers don’t forget their babies, even brainwashed ones. Adoption is so tightly regulated in the UK that this would have been exposed,

I think Robin did say something about the importance of shattering the Drowned Prophet myth for that reason - bringing it down from within by empowering the members through mental liberation. But I'd need to read it again, I'm not sure.

I found the cast of characters hard to keep track of.

The problem is that they needed the cooperation of members to testify. They were also terrified that the drowned prophet would be out to get them.

Will in particular didn't want to testify against the church and they needed to convince him, and others, that the drowned prophet didn't exist.

Flora said she saw her before she tried to kill herself, but later realised she wasn't real. They needed Will to do the same.

Once they all realised this, they would be happier about giving evidence.

That's the power of divine retribution. Papa J and Mazu might not be able to get you, but the divine always will.

I don't think the levitation trick was actually explained. There are several ways to do it (simplest one is if you face away from the audience and step on a concealed box or something...easy to do in long robes but you can do it with trousers that have a hidden split and fake shaping in one leg and an attached shoe) but I don't think the book specified it. Just that Dennis showed Will how to do it.

I found this that might explain the levitating. https://www.wikihow.com/Levitate-(Magic-Trick)

So presumably Pat’s family all know where she works now.

That's probably it...I think Pat said it was a two inch levitation!

Partly J agree with you on, on the other hand babies were trafficked from catholic mother baby homes in Ireland into the US for decades and nothing happened and nobody got prosecuted for it. But yes seems implausible this could happen on a grand scale in the UK now.

The parts about Robin inside were really hard to read and I was so glad when she finally managed to escape. Generally didn’t like the amount of suicides (Cherry and Charlotte - why kill her of completely) of mothers of young children. Overall the plot was good and the ending a complete surprise to me.
So glad Strike made a move at the end!
i think we are two books of the end, so I think they will become a couple in the final book. There are signs in every book now. I doubt they will have children.

Unfortunately, the baby trafficking isn't that unlikely. All it takes is the wherewithal to bribe the right people.

The reason Scientology has never been prosecuted is because they successfully infiltrated the LAPD (headquarters are in Los Angeles) decades ago. Remember, they have a shit ton of money to spread around and cops are easy to buy.

Meanwhile. Leah Remini is still trying to find Shelly Miscavige who (was) disappeared in 2007. She has a lot to say about police corruption in LA on her YouTube channel.

Charlotte was so self destructive that she was always heading towards taking her own life. I thought it was good that Strike was saddened by her death but refused to take responsibility for it. It wasn't his fault that Charlotte made that decision and he shouldn't be expected to live his life enslaved to her and her destructiveness under that threat.

Absolutely, and the Strike of books 1 or 2 would totally have blamed himself for Charlotte's suicide. The Strike of book 7 has come a long way.

Also, there comes a point where clinging to a toxic person starts to reflect badly on you. Strike had his epiphany in the last book, when Charlotte knew her kids weren't safe with her ex but didn't care and would leave them with him if it meant she could see Strike. That was the point when he lost the last of his love for her. It was also the point where he would have become jointly culpable for what happened to those kids had he agreed to it. Our choices show what we are.

Plot wise Charlotte needs to be 100% no shadow of a doubt gone, or Robin would always be thinking of her. It looked like in book 2 or 3 she might just go away, but she never does, she always keeps coming back to Strike. She had to be killed off somehow.

WRT the legalities of baby trafficking, there are some shocking things that go on in the US with fundamentalist churches and international adoption. If the cult had private jets it's also possible that they simply flew the babies out without anyone officially knowing about it.

@BertieBotts even on private jets you have to show passports and submit the information in advance.

i know babies are trafficked en masse from countries like Haiti to the US and JK Rowling’s charity also did some research on this. It seems unlikely though that it can happen in a large scale from the UK. But of course not impossible.

@CliantheLang interesting re scientology, thanks for sharing.

I like the theory is this threat that Noli is based on Emma Watson 😂🫣

Wonder who the pervy author is based on?

Yes, me too. An utterly vacuous actress who mindlessly clambers from one one woke wagon to the next in a desperate attempt to stay relevant.

JKR is much, much too classy to make it obvious but I do like the Noli theory too. I cracked up when the literary agent was the baddie in The Silkworm. Stick it to the industry, Jo!

And I laughed my head off at the "radical feminist witch" line in Troubled Blood (I think, not IBH?) too. She's got a truly wicked sense of humour.