So, here are some thoughts expanding on what I was saying about mothers/parents/families in TB. My copy is at the bottom of the house down a number of flights of stairs and I am tucked up in bed and can't be bothered to fetch it, so sorry if I remember it all wrong. I'm posting this to get it off my chest, so I am honestly happy if you all just want to talk about Tom while I witter to myself.
The case in Troubled Blood (I think the title is a pointer to the theme of fractured families) is about a daughter looking for her lost mother for some kind of reassurance that she was loved and not deserted. Strike and Robin manage to achieve this for her, as well as reconciling her to her remaining family; they also manage to help a grieving father find his daughter's body in the course of the investigation, reuniting another family.
Both Robin and Strikes reassess their own families in the course of the book, especially Strike. He begins in Cornwall, needing to be there but also profoundly uncomfortable with his own family, fighting with Lucy about their respective 'mothers', Leda and Joan, and kicking off about her kids and children in general. Strike's growth in the book is becoming more comfortable with his Cornwall family, and as EO has so eloquently put it, allowing himself to experience the affirmation of Joan to show him what love really can be. At her funeral, though, he also has a glimpse of his London 'family' (basically Robin) and longs to return to them. At the same time, he violently rejects the extended Rokeby family who would spin their web around him and gather him up if he would allow them. Chapter 58 shows Strike opening up to a real 'family' member (Robin) about his memories of rejection by his father, and his determination not to be a parent himself, which Charlotte had always shared, but Robin challenges. He hasn't really shifted from that view by the end of the investigation as far as we can see, but he does acknowledge to himself how much he wanted Joan's maternal affirmation that he has done a good thing - he is just starting to see families in a slightly different light, and beginning to wonder if he does in fact want to live detached and alone and free from emotional and family ties.
Robin's storyline in TB begins with tracking down a bigamist (someone who has deceitfully multiplied his families). Then she has that very uncomfortable Christmas with her family, who are all obsessed with her baby niece, while she feels as if she is going in a different direction to them, even to her favourite cousin. Her mother seems to be on her back about settling down (and having a family?) and she feels at outs with them all. (She's also very sad for Ilsa that she can't become a mother, although Rowling doesn't make much of this.) Robin's realisation in chapter 58 is that she can't subscribe to the conventional family life that Matthew would have wanted (although Matthew seems to be becoming a parent somewhat reluctantly, so it may not work out for him as he has always expected). Although she does not completely reject the idea of children, her work and her work family are going to take priority at this point. She shares some of her own childhood memories with Strike later, in Skegness, which are tinged with melancholy, but by the time of her birthday, her mother is, if not entirely off her back, at least silenced by her dismissal of Morris, and Robin acknowledges that she is very lucky to have had a stable loving family. So both of them feel a bit more comfortable with their own families by the end of the book.
Not sure where Rowling could go with this, but I wonder if we will see Robin finding enough fulfilment in her work to disregard the conventional marriage/children expectations, or whether she is going to find it as hard to reconcile as many women do. If Strike is in fact (as most of us hope) moving towards a relationship with Robin, will the agency be enough of a legacy, or will they end up wanting children? We all wait, more or less patiently, to find out. In my case, I'm waiting very impatiently indeed.