New Cormoran Strike book

[Hallelujah2020]

Released September 2025!!

Just reached chapter 16. Really enjoying it so far although I am getting a little lost with the amount of characters! Have to keep flipping back to work out who everyone is.
Also agree that Strike's behaviour towards Robin isn't great 😕.

I’m sure someone has a spreadsheet going.

I always plan to read it slowly, make a list of characters and try figure out all the obvious in hindsight clues. I never do.

Maybe JKR will write a plain who dunnit when Robin & Strike have done all their growing and are happily married.

My DH has picked up TRG again after a long gap. I'm going to have to remind myself of some of the details before he finishes it. He commented that the little details are all spot on and although the books are long none of the content is fluff, it's all relevant.

Well, having picked up TRG just to fill in a day before THM arrived - I have just this minute finished the former.

Hoping I’ll remember the few chapters I’ve already read of the latter, and don’t have to start all over again.

I’m still reading this! I can’t seem to make the time to read as much as I’d like to…only read 300 pages.

Running Grave is excellent, but found it much darker.

RG was a fantastic read.

And the consequences are so powerfully portrayed at the start of THM. But I cannot help feeling that were it not for the central relationship (and my £15 investment in the hardback) I might have given up on THM before I got even halfway. It’s an awful lot of pages to spend on a criminal investigation where one doesn’t really care about any victim or perpetrator.

I finished a couple of days ago (I had a reeeealy long journey) and it was so so good. I may hop over to the spoilers thread.
I'm on the Reddit board for Strike novels - I must be obsessed!

That's a distinct drawback for THM. We're presented with a fistful of contenders for the murder victim, but with all of them I didn't really care whether they were dead or alive and it was the longstanding cast members plus Kim's shenanigans that kept me turning the pages.

I’ve finished and what a chore it was. Like a PP said, I probably wouldn’t have carried on with it if it wasn’t for the financial outlay and being invested in the central relationship. The murder case was, quite frankly, fucking boring. And the whole thing much, much too long.

I finished last night -from the library and due back tomorrow.
I enjoy the writing but not particularly the story of detecting. It’s probably like real life where there are many threads that go no where but it’s often very meandering to read.
I will of course get the next 2 books but would be nice to have a shorter book!

I would definitely have given up halfway through if it wasn’t for the central relationship.
The central relationship is the only reason I read Cormoran Strike novels tbh!
Although, as far as the detecting element goes, The Running Grave was excellent. Cults have always interested me…not enough to join one thankfully.

I came on here because I've only just started reading THM (was rather hoping the kindle price would have dropped by now), and was wondering if anyone else was troubled by the plot hole you could drive a bus through about why they hadn't been able to positively identify ( or exclude) the body in the vault as being Knowles right at the beginning?
I'm only about 20 chapters in, so don't want to go on the spoilers thread to see if it's mentioned / explained there, but it's annoying me.

They do explain it. All of the potential victims have no real DNA possibilities.

one is adopted, another both parents are dead, no siblings.

but in Knowles case, I think the police just wanted it to be him so made it fit. The implication is that they were keen to get the press off their backs and quash any masonic ties.

Yes but Knowles was the easy one to identify @outofofficeagain - he'd been arrested, so he'd be on the DNA database. They'd have known if it was him or not within a day or so.
It's made worse by the waffling on about not wanting to approach his family for samples for fear of outing the undercover officer - they wouldn't have needed to, they would have just submitted a sample to the database, job done.

Is dna routinely taken though for an arrest? Fingerprints yes.

Yes @outofofficeagain it is. Well the first time they are arrested it is. Once there's a confirmed profile on the database they're only fingerprinted for subsequent arrests (to confirm identity).
It's part of my job to know this stuff, so that's why it jumped out at me as being wrong.

Had he been charged/convicted or just arrested?

Don’t they have to delete the data if someone’s arrested but no conviction?

No, Criminal Justice Act 2003. DNA is taken at point of arrest and loaded onto the database. Originally the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 mandated that the database sample could only be speculatively searched post conviction, but this was modified by the later legislation.
It really is a big hole and I’m surprised no-one picked it up (I assume she has procedural advisors).

No, Criminal Justice Act 2003. DNA is taken at point of arrest and loaded onto the database. Originally the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 mandated that the database sample could only be speculatively searched post conviction, but this was modified by the later legislation.
It really is a big hole and I’m surprised no-one picked it up (I assume she has procedural advisors).

Sorry for the double post - don't know what happened there!

This is set in 2017 though does that make any difference? Although it doesn't make sense that they couldn't search it to confirm a murder victim if they thought he had a previous conviction. When did they start taking DNA at the point of arrest?

They've always taken it at point of arrest @RubieChewsDay , it's just that in the early years it wasn't supposed to be searchable on the database (to find other crimes they might have committed) until after they were convicted of the crime it was taken for.
You can imagine how well that went... There were a couple of high profile murder cases that were dismissed because they were based on DNA hits that shouldn't have been made, because the accused's DNA shouldn't have been searchable on the database when the hits were made.
This led to first of all the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 which allowed DNA to be retained if the person was acquitted (so basically if they got charged it was ok to keep the DNA) and then later the CJA 2003 that I mentioned in my last post that allows loading onto the database at point of arrest.
Sorry for the essay, but basically this has been the case since 2003. And it's not obscure legislation, it's pretty basic stuff. If my first year policing students didn't know it I'd be disappointed in them.
It's also fairly standard in missing person enquiries to take a personal item belonging to the missing person (toothbrush or hairbrush are favourites) to get a profile to load onto the DNA database. Then when samples are submitted from unidentified bodies they often hit against one of these profiles enabling identification. I know this wouldn't have happened for Fleetwood, because the police don't believe he's missing, but it should at least have happened for Semple as there was an investigation of sorts and probably for the other one (Temple / Templar - the name escapes me).
I'm far too invested in this aren't I 😂

@igivein thanks so much for the detailed explanation.

I think for Tyler, the house had been cleared (probably by Griff) so they didn't have any of his personal belongings, but I would have thought that they would have the DNA of SAS operatives on file in case they needed to id a body from an operation gone wrong.

I guess it's a case of needing to suspend disbelief to enable it to make sense that Robin & Strike are involved, but that's difficult when you're being asked to forget knowledge of your specialist subject!!