If you purchase THE RUNNING GRAVE today, you will join everyone else in reading it for the first time. There are no advance reading copies sent out to reviewers. I’m not sure why this is the case. Must be some marketing ploy or instructions from the all-powerful author J.K. Rowling (a.k.a. Robert Galbraith).
THE RUNNING GRAVE, which runs to 960 pages, is the seventh in the excellent Cormoran Strike/Robin Ellacott series. If I like the book it will be featured on the cover of the next issue of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine.
My Associate Editor Larry Gandle alerted me to the fact that I could download the audio of this book a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know why this was available to audio reviewers ahead of time, but grateful for the lead time. I’ve listened to 35 of the 140 chapters so I have a head start on my reading. I hope to get the physical book in the next day or so.
Plot: Private Detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott are contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside.
The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organization that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths.
In order to try to rescue Will, Strike’s business partner, Robin Ellacott, decides to infiltrate the cult, and she travels to Norfolk to live incognito among its members. But in doing so, she is unprepared for the dangers that await her there or for the toll it will take on her.
As with the other novels in the series, the romantic tension between Cormoran and Robin is the tantalizing backdrop to the mystery plot. It looks like this subplot will finally come to a head in this novel, but J.K. Rowling has shown several ways to delay that inevitability in the past, so you’ll just have to read the book to see what happens.