 UK first edition cover | |
| Author | Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Crime fiction |
| Publisher | Sphere Books |
Publication date | 26 September 2023 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Pages | 960 |
| ISBN | 978-0-3165-7210-1 |
| Preceded by | The Ink Black Heart |
The Running Grave is a crime fiction novel written by J. K. Rowling, and published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. It was published 26 September 2023. It is the seventh novel in the Cormoran Strike series. [1]
Sir Colin Edensor, a retired civil servant, approaches Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott's detective agency seeking assistance extricating his son Will from the Universal Humanitarian Church (UHC), which has been deemed a cult by critics but claims to be a benevolent charity. Will, who has autism, had joined the church and cut off all contact with his family, not even responding to news of his mother's death, and was believed to be living on Chapman Farm near Aylmerton in Norfolk, operated by the church and serving as its headquarters.
As Strike reads about the UHC, he realises that it was formed on the site of a 1960s to 1980s commune, the Aylmerton Community, where his transient mother Leda briefly brought him and his half-sister Lucy to live in childhood. The commune closed after its leaders were arrested for child sexual abuse, but Strike had not himself been abused in this manner, though he still intensely dislikes the place. When he mentions it to Lucy, she reacts intensely negatively, finally revealing that she was sexually assaulted as a child by the farm's doctor after being procured for him by Mazu, an older girl who is now one of the UHC's leaders.
Robin volunteers to infiltrate the UHC, getting a makeover as somebody with "more money than sense". Meanwhile, both detectives find former church members to interview and dig up records of incidents connected to the church. They uncover several mysterious deaths, including the 1995 drowning of the 7-year-old Daiyu, Mazu's daughter, who is now venerated as the "Drowned Prophet", central to the UHC's mythology.
After attending services at the UHC temple in London, Robin, undercover using the name Rowena Ellis, is invited to a retreat at Chapman Farm. Strike and the agency works out a system to keep in touch with her at the farm using a hollow fake rock which notes can be left inside to communicate. As planned, she joins the UHC in a baptism ceremony at the end of the retreat. Robin finds that Will Edensor is living on the farm and has fathered a daughter, named Qing by Mazu, who names all the children born on the farm, with a teenage girl named Lin. Church members are under pressure to have sex with other members (termed "spirit bonding"); all forms of birth control are banned there and pregnancies are encouraged.
Meanwhile, Strike continues seeking people connected with the UHC and working on other cases including the stalking of an actress, Tasha Mayo. Other issues come up with the agency and Strike's personal life: a subcontractor, Clive Littlejohn, is found to be a "double agent" for the competing Pattersons detective agency; Strike's uncle Ted, whose wife Joan recently died, is diagnosed with dementia and becomes increasingly unable to live on his own; Strike's brief sexual dalliance with attorney Bijou Watkins drags him into the middle of a scandal resulting from her affair with another prominent attorney; and Strike's ex-fiancee Charlotte keeps trying to get back into his life, this time telling him she has cancer.
On the farm, Robin talks to other members about past events there, relaying findings to the agency weekly via the hollow rock. While hiding in a barn, she finds Polaroid pictures featuring young people in pig masks performing sexual acts, and puts them in the rock the following week. She also stumbles onto a mysterious clearing with the remains of posts that have been cut down, burnt rope, and a tree with a rusty axe in its roots.
After waking in a hotel near the beach where Daiyu drowned, having interviewing people who witnessed the event the day before, Strike learns that Charlotte has committed suicide. He is racked with conflicting guilt and anger, and enters a tower in the distance, which he remembers from his childhood on the commune and is visible from the farm where Robin is now. It resembles a chess rook, but turns out to be a church, and Strike enters it and has an imaginary conversation with Charlotte, emerging more at peace.
Robin goes with a group of UHC members to Norwich to collect donations. While there, she mistakenly responds to somebody yelling "Robin!" actually a child referring to a stuffed bird, which is noticed by another cult member. She starts to fear this has compromised her identity, but this is quickly overshadowed when Emily Pirbright runs away. Robin finds her in a toy shop, and talks with her before returning to the others, as Emily decides not to run away from the UHC; though at odds with the leadership, she is too strongly indoctrinated. However, Emily tells Robin that she is certain Daiyu did not drown, and believes her to still be alive.
After luring Will to a Retreat Room, Robin breaks the news of his mother's death, which he never received, as all his letters are being confiscated by Mazu. At the ceremony for the apparition of the Drowned Prophet, Robin is dragged under the water of the baptismal pool and nearly drowns. Jonathan Wace insists this is because she made the prophet angry through her behavior with Will, and she is locked in a kneeling position inside a wooden box for eight hours as punishment. After being let out, Robin is sent to look after an extremely ill child called Jacob who is being held without food or treatment. That evening, after Jonathan Wace commands her to have sex against her will with his son Taio, Robin runs for the blind spot where Strike is waiting, having not received a message from her that week and found the hollow rock missing. Strike beats up Taio, who was pursuing Robin, and escapes with her to a nearby lodge he checked into earlier. They report the dying Jacob to the local police.
Later, Robin is invited by the Metropolitan Police for a voluntary interview, where she learns that she has been accused of child sexual abuse by the cult. Strike and Robin interview former UHC members including Carrie Curtis Woods, as Cherie Gittins is now known, who insists Daiyu Wace drowned when she took her to the beach. Carrie commits suicide a few hours afterward.
Days later, Will turns up at the agency's office with his daughter, having escaped the farm. Will intends to turn himself in to the police once Lin, who was transferred from the farm after inducing a miscarriage with mugwort, is safe. He reveals that Jacob died a few days after Robin's escape. Pat and her husband Dennis volunteer to care for Will and Qing at their house while Midge and grateful client Tasha, who have begun dating after her abduction case was closed, find Lin at Dr. Zhou's medical centre near London and try to release her. Robin arranges an interview between Will and fellow former UHC member Flora Brewster, who convinces Will that the Drowned Prophet, whom he still fears, is not real when she reveals the church's "Divine Secrets" without dying - Jonathan Wace's corrective rape of mentally ill women and lesbians, the burial of unreported dead at the farm, and a huge-scale child trafficking operation.
Strike and Robin go to their police contacts with the information and coordinate a crackdown on the UHC. Robin interviews Carrie's ex-boyfriend in prison, who tells her Carrie revealed when drunk that the supposed drowning of Daiyu was a cover-up, and agrees to testify. Strike breaks the news the police have raided Chapman Farm and the Birmingham centre, which was used as a base for trafficking surplus babies born to UHC members. Robin pursues Becca to the UHC's Rupert Court temple as Strike confronts Abigail Glover, where he deduced murdered her stepsister Daiyu. Jealous of the attention Daiyu got from her father, Abigail forced three other youths at the farm to help her abduct Daiyu, kill her and dismember her body to feed to pigs in a makeshift pen in the woods, and fake her drowning. He also deduces that she owned the Polaroid camera, and used it take the pornographic photos for her own enjoyment. At the temple, Robin finds Mazu Wace, hiding there with a UHC member's stolen baby, who tries to kill her with a rifle before Midge intervenes.
In the epilogue, Jonathan Wace has been arrested trying to drive across the United States border into Mexico, Mazu insists that she is still the mother of the Drowned Prophet despite all evidence to the contrary, and Becca remains faithful to the now-discredited UHC. Will is reunited with Lin and his family, and they rename their daughter Sally in honour of his late mother. Strike has one last meeting with Charlotte's sister Amelia, where they discuss Charlotte's suicide note in which she lashed out and blamed everyone she knew. Just before Robin leaves for a trip with her boyfriend Ryan Murphy, Strike confesses his love for her.
The Running Grave sold 50,925 copies in its first week on sale in the UK, placing it first on the UK Official Top 50 book sales list. [2]
Joan Smith, writing in The Times , says the book reveals Rowling's "extraordinary resilience" to remain in the public eye after suffering "vicious abuse", and also shows her "intense sympathy for the underdog". [3] Jake Kerridge from The Daily Telegraph rated the book 3 out of 5 stars, calling it "some of her most gripping writing yet" but asking "did it have to be so long?" [1] Laura Wilson, writing in The Guardian , says it could have had some "judicious trimming" but was still "an immersive, and, for the most part, riveting read." [4]
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The Cuckoo's Calling is a 2013 crime fiction novel written by J. K. Rowling, and published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. It is the first novel in the Cormoran Strike series of detective novels and was followed by The Silkworm in 2014, Career of Evil in 2015, Lethal White in 2018, Troubled Blood in 2020 and The Ink Black Heart in 2022. A seventh book The Running Grave was published on 26 September 2023.
Cormoran Strike is a series of crime fiction novels written by British author J. K. Rowling under the pen name Robert Galbraith. The story chronicles the cases of the fictional British private detective Cormoran Strike and his partner Robin Ellacott. Seven novels have so far been published in a planned series of ten. The seventh novel, titled The Running Grave, was released on 26 September 2023. As of February 2024, the series has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide and was published in more than 50 countries, being translated into 43 languages.
The Haunting of Sharon Tate is a 2019 American horror thriller film written and directed by Daniel Farrands, and starring Hilary Duff, Jonathan Bennett, Lydia Hearst, Pawel Szajda and Ryan Cargill. The film is a fictionalized account of the 1969 Tate murders, following actress Sharon Tate (Duff) as she suffers premonitions of her murder by the Manson family.
Lethal White is the fourth novel in the Cormoran Strike series, written by J. K. Rowling and published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. The novel was released on 18 September 2018.
Troubled Blood is the fifth novel in the Cormoran Strike series, written by J. K. Rowling and published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. The novel was released on 15 September 2020.
The Ink Black Heart is a crime fiction novel written by J. K. Rowling, and published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. It was published 30 August 2022. It is the sixth and the longest novel in the Cormoran Strike series.