The Ink Black Heart

by Robert Galbraith (Auteur)

Hardcover, 2022

Status

Available

Call number

823.914

Publication

Sphere (2022), 944 pages

Description

Fiction. Suspense. Thriller. HTML: The latest installment in the highly acclaimed, internationally bestselling Strike series finds Cormoran and Robin ensnared in another winding, wicked case. When frantic, disheveled Edie Ledwell appears in the office begging to speak to her, private detective Robin Ellacott doesn't know quite what to make of the situation. The cocreator of a popular cartoon, The Ink Black Heart, Edie is being persecuted by a mysterious online figure who goes by the pseudonym of Anomie. Edie is desperate to uncover Anomie's true identity. Robin decides that the agency can't help with this�??and thinks nothing more of it until a few days later, when she reads the shocking news that Edie has been tasered and then murdered in Highgate Cemetery, the location of The Ink Black Heart. Robin and her business partner, Cormoran Strike, become drawn into the quest to uncover Anomie's true identity. But with a complex web of online aliases, business interests and family conflicts to navigate, Strike and Robin find themselves embroiled in a case that stretches their powers of deduction to the limits �?? and which threatens them in new and horrifying ways . . . A gripping, fiendishly clever mystery, The Ink Black Heart is a true tour-de-force.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member pgchuis

I was disappointed with this book. It was very long, which would have been fine if there had been enough plot to fill the pages, but there really wasn't. Strike and Robin spent the book organizing an almost ludicrously inefficient scheme to work out the identity of Amonie, an online troll and game

creator. The chapters where the moderators of the game communicated with each other were difficult to read and extremely boring. The online abuse (and there was a lot of it) was unpleasant to read and unnecessarily voluminous. Yasmin was described as fat every time she appeared for no real reason - it read like abuse on the part of the narrator. The solution to the identity of Amonie was underwhelming and really only arrived at because that character went berserk at the end.

The Strike and Robin will they/won't they continues, and I enjoyed the Charlotte/Jago/Madeline thread more than the main plot.

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LibraryThing member passion4reading

The co-creator of a cult cartoon on YouTube, Edie Ledwell, asks Robin for help in finding out who has been trolling her online. The troll is calling themself Anomie, and virtually nothing is known about them except that they have co-created an online game based on the cartoon. Robin regrets that

they can't take on the case and finds out shortly afterwards that Edie has been found murdered in Highgate Cemetery, the setting of both the cartoon and the game. After the police investigation is going nowhere fast, Strike and Robin are contacted by Edie's agent, who asks them to find out who Anomie is. With pseudonymous social media accounts and a far-right terrorist group entangled in the investigation, this is the beginning of a case that will test the detectives to their limits.

This was a very different book from Troubled Blood, with the duo investigating a large percentage of the time by trawling social media accounts for clues and playing Drek's Game, and I shared in their frustration at their own physical inactivity and lack of progress. While the central mystery is intriguing, it's difficult to translate it to the page and to make it fast-paced and exciting. Too much of reading this book felt like a chore, reflected in the fact that it took me over three months to finish it. Amid the Twitter feeds and online chats in the game there are a few developments that propel the case forward, shocking in their violence and because they're so unexpected; though welcome, this makes for very uneven pacing on the whole. While this is probably a fair reflection of investigations in the real world, it's not a good premise for a book, and the tension and pace were so diluted as to be virtually non-existent in places.

As always, the interplay between the two main protagonists makes the book worth reading, though I couldn't help feeling that JK Rowling is coming up with plot devices to keep Robin and Strike apart, which is in danger of getting tiring quickly. However, there's no question of not continuing with the series, and it'll be interesting to see what's next in store for the detectives.

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LibraryThing member infjsarah

This is a chunkster - over 1000 pages. I enjoy the Strike novels a lot and mostly enjoyed this one. But it is too long. A good proportion of the online chat could have been removed as it is repetitive. And I really dislike the will they, won't they aspect of Strike & Robin. It bores me and sadly

there's a lot of it in this novel. But the central crime is interesting and I thought I knew whodunnit but I was wrong ;)
So worth the read but with a few criticisms.

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LibraryThing member jandm

Sadly I didn’t get on with the case our great characters were investigating.

LibraryThing member Doondeck

Worst book ever written by Rowling. Too many characters. Ridiculous recitation of on-line chat that was impossible to follow. Finally I skipped all that. Desperately in need of an editor to cut it down to manageable size. Big disappointment.

LibraryThing member bookworm12

Six books in and this series just keeps getting better. Despite the book being 1,000+ pgs, I couldn’t put it down. Cormoran and Robin end up with an overwhelming workload for the agency. Between a cyberbully, abusive father, and shoplifting stepson, the subcontractors are overwhelmed. It’s the

cyber case that takes center stage as Drek’s Game, a fan-created ode to a quirky cartoon, takes on a dark edge in the real world. It’s never the cases that blow me away in these books. It’s the character development and interactions between the leads. I love seeing how they sharpen each other and work well together. Seeing Robin’s skill as a detective grow without Matthew’s interference is such a joy. I loved that Strike is starting to realize he needs to make some healthier choices as well, both physically and emotionally. They are both damaged people, but their interactions and friendship have a depth that’s hard to find in most detective stories.

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LibraryThing member Citizenjoyce

After years of being online trolled and, I'm sure, threatened with all manner of bodily harm Rowlings has responded with a thousand-page book about vile online trollers connecting them with white supremacists, pedophiles, and murderers. If you come for a beloved, intelligent, rich, powerful author

you should expect her to respond just like this. This book, in which she supports women against men who delight in taking advantage of them, is her response to that malice. Good for her.

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LibraryThing member foggidawn

Strike and Robin investigate a crime originating in an online fandom. I enjoyed the story here, though I thought there was a bit of hand-waving done over the technical aspects of cybercrime and how that can be investigated. It's a massive chunk of a book, and I listened to the audio version, both

to spare my wrists and because I've enjoyed the narrator's work in the previous books in the series. I'm not sure audio is the best medium for enjoying the book, though, because of the sections that are supposed to be text conversations or chatroom conversations. I picked up the hardcover to see how these conversations are rendered in print, and some take place simultaneously, which is not always obvious in the audiobook. I also thought the book could have been shorter -- the plot gets in the weeds a little bit while following the various suspects and getting the opinions of various people about the identity of an anonymous character. Still, it's clear that the author knows a lot about online fandoms and the interactions therein (nudge, wink), and the conversations between characters ring true. Fans of the series will most likely enjoy this instalment.

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LibraryThing member TheoClarke

Overlong, deeply unpleasant book with an unduly complex structure. The audiobook was particularly opaque.

LibraryThing member Kathy89

This was an interesting story about cyber-stalking, cults, and pedophilia. The author of an online game comes to Robin because she is being threatened but Robin tells her that they don’t do cyber cases and refers her to another agency. She’s murdered and Robin feels guilty and the agency is

involved.

I enjoyed catching up on Robin and Strike’s lives but it’s time for them to stop all the miscommunication and say how they feel about one another.

Even though the story is interesting the book could have used a lot of editing because there’s pages of texts that could have been condensed into a sentence or two.

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LibraryThing member reading_fox

Long, but not quite as long as it seems because it contains a lot of online chatroom discussions that the publisher has chosen to re-format such that it appears twice. The chemistry between Robin and Strike remains scintillating and there remains scope for more works in the series for which I'm

hopeful.

However as with all of these books the plot and many of the characters are somewhat dark and unpleasant. It's an interesting choice from Rowling and possibly a degree of projecting what she's been through online into her characters' lives. A teenage couple have written a somewhat dark and wacky online cartoon, mostly as fun for themselves when it becomes an online sensation. AT the time that there are rumors of it being commissioned by netflix, they've fallen out, and then are found attacked in Highgate Cemetery. The girl is dead and the boy badly injured. As with all online fandoms there are some unsavoury characters around, one of whom concerns the copyright holders so much they consult Robin and Strike to identify them. It soon becomes apparent that the darker aspects of the cartoon have at tracked the attention of the far right, incels, and plenty of others attacking the creators for perceived insults, innocent mistakes and jealosy. The list of potential suspects grows very long.

One of the unusual aspects is the incorporation of the in-game conversations with the participants only known by pseudo-names. Strike and Robin spend a lot of time trying to identify them - but ti's never clear how this information would ever be available to the reader - it's not like it could have even been reconstructed. I've never liked this style of writing where the antagonist is revealed but no attempt is ever made to explain why their actions make sense to them. There's also a high percentage of the reader being told Strike and Robin's thoughts rather than having the shown through their actions - this hasn't changed throughout the series, and it's just the style that's been adopted but it always throws me out of the story a bit.

Not perhaps the highlight of the series, but complex and enjoyable

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LibraryThing member andsoitgoes

Enjoy this series immensely but this one was way too long. I liked the storyline and all the online situations of how anonymous people can ruin someone's life. I felt like Galbraith/Rowling was inserting her own experiences with the online communities criticisms of her choices (i.e. the marketing

of the Harry Potter series) and views. I will continue with this series but hoping the next book will be under 1000 pages!

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LibraryThing member Aronfish

I'll keep reading any novel featuring Cormoran Strike and his sidekick Robin. This one felt very internal because of all the cited social media conversations that became part of the investigation into the murder of an online game's creator. It probably could have been edited down-- it was very

long--- but I enjoy traveling in their world, so I was happy to be along for their long ride.

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LibraryThing member 06nwingert

Edie Ledwell is a popular YouTuber, with her creation, The Ink Black Heart. Some of her fans turned her cartoons into a game, but the fandom spiraled out of control. edits was harassed by an online user, Anomie. Edie then goes to Cormoran Strike and his partner, Robin Ellacott, asking for their

help. however, their agency is overwhelmed and has never pursued cyber crime. The story takes a dark turn when Edie is found tasered and dead, and her co-creator is paralyzed. that’s when Strike and Robin agree to solve the mystery.
Holy cow! I was blown away. This is the first JK Rowling book over 1,000 pages, and it doesn’t disappoint. Between the main plot, Strike and Robins working ( and blossoming personal ) relationship, Strikes past with his ex, Charlotte, the reader is constantly engaged. This Is the first Strike book where I took notes and tried to guess the murderer, altugt I changed my answers every few chapters.
This book also hints at the real-world consequences of the internet: toxic fandoms, online stalking. Online bullying, children shut up in their rooms on computers all day, and oblivious parents.

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LibraryThing member shiatsujude

Overall far too long and drawn out.
Main characters remain interesting but this storyline is nonsense

LibraryThing member Romonko

Perhaps it is my age, or perhaps it's my total indifference to social media and all its iterations like Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, instagram, but I truly did not get really into this book like I usually do with this series. The mystery was a good one, and it finally did get really exciting at the

end. And that is another of the things that caused me to shake my head - the sheer length of the book! 1,300 odd pages is a lot of book! The writing is superb as well, but I did find some of the dialogues and transcripts of Twitter feeds and internet chats far too graphic for my tastes. I was extremely uncomfortable through about 30% of the book, but the other 70% held me enthralled. There is no doubt that Robert Galbraith (aka J K Rowling) is a very skilled and talented author, and her characterizations are incredible. In this book Corm and Robin's detective agency are run off their feet with business. Then along comes a visitor that Robin meets. A young Gothic woman who has a very strange tale to tell about her on-line cartoon called The Ink Black Heart and the on-line abuse that she is receiving.. Robin is intrigued but knows that they're too busy to take on this case. Then Robin hears that the young woman is killed and her boyfriend was stabbed in the very graveyard on which her story is based. So Corm, Robin and their three contract detectives are on the tail of a particularly odious killer. At much risk to Comoran and Robin and to their business they continue on the quest to find a killer who uses the internet as his/her hunting ground. This is a particularly horrifying book, and probably realistically illustrates the danger of on-line relationships and influences. And it reminds parents that they must be particularly vigilant in monitoring their offspring's on-line footprint. Rowling has shown us in this book what a truly scary world we live in now. Although I did not like the format and the pages and pages of internet-speak, I still enjoyed the story, and I love Comoran and Robin and will eagerly awake the next instalment.

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LibraryThing member Eyejaybee

The sixth outing for investigatory partnership Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott is another great success. It is a huge book, and manages to encompass several subplots beyond the engrossing main story. It comes in at 1,012 pages of fairly small type, but it never seems to flag. I have read a lot

of very long books recently (although none quite as long as thins), but have generally felt that they might quite easily have been one or two hundred pages shorter without significantly marring the overall effect. Not so with this book, which was so engrossing that I never really noticed the size (except while trying to read it in bed, when its sheer weight made it difficult to hold one handed).

Given the scale of the book, and its interlaced plots I am not sure how pithy a synopsis I can offer. Basically the book revolves around the murder of Edie Ledwell in Highgate Cemetery. With her former boyfriend, Edie had created a series of macabre cartoons set in the cemetery which had gone on to become a YouTube sensation. Indeed, such was their popularity that an online game had been created based around the cartoon characters, which had led some followers to become obsessed. When plans for a film based around the cartoon are mooted, some fans take against Edie, believing she has sold out. She is persecuted by trolls online, with frequent threats against her life, while other people post details of her address and pictures of her home. Shortly before she is killed, she visited the offices of Strike and Ellacott with a view to commissioning them to investigate who is behind the internet abuse. As digital investigations were not their speciality, Robin recommended that she try a different firm. Shortly afterwards she was murdered.

Obviously, there are some highly personal elements here for Robert Galbraith (who, as we all know, is actually J K Rowling), who has herself been the victim of sustained trolling following her expression of opinions that some people deemed transphobic. One of the especial; Ly clever aspects of the book is the way she renders lengthy Twitter threads in which hatred for Edie Ledwell is conveyed in increasingly violet terms. She also reproduces supposed exchanges through the chat facility in the game based on Edie’s characters, which is ‘managed’ by someone known only as ‘Anomie’. These are presumably influenced by the opprobrium to which Rowling herself has been subject.

Being a middle-aged man (well that’s my story and I am, sticking to it), I have never read the Harry Potter books, but if they were written with even a fraction of the skill that Rowling has deployed in this series, I can readily understand how they reached such a large fanbase. This is the sixth book to feature Strike and Ellacott, and while I think it would work perfectly well as a stand-alone book for people not yet familiar with the scenario, the characters have developed an extremely strong verisimilitude over the sequence as a whole.

This is certainly one of the best books I have read in what has already been a very strong year.

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LibraryThing member Figgles

Latest installment in the Strike/Ellacot oeuvre is an interesting read, but somewhat for the wrong reasons. Ink Black Heart sees Cormoran and Robin tracking down the leader of a group of online trolls, who seems to have graduated from insult and rape/death threats to murder. On the way they tangle

with neo-Nazis, misogynist pickup artists, cosplay fans, right wing trolls and misguided SJWs. I couldn't help feeling Rowling's own struggles with trolls (thanks to her perceived/real? transphobia) has overwhelmed the plot (though I agree that some of the groups she identifies pose far more serious threats to social order than the average punter realises). I suspect however that the average punter will find the copious transcription of pseudonymous online chat (often up to three threads simultaneously) slows the story down rather than enhancing the plot, I suspect a bit of editing might've made this easier to read. I did enjoy the UST between Strike and Robin, as they slowly move towards admitting, what everyone but themselves can see, that they are made for each other... So, not the best in the series but still an interesting read, don't start with this one if you're new!

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LibraryThing member thiscatsabroad

I can understand why people would either love or hate this book because its target audience (unlike the previous novels) is very precise. I liked the premise of the novel, & for the most part I liked the gamers & fandom attendant on the Ink Black Heart´s animated series & online game. I

appreciated the elevation of Robin´s character & role in the novel, & I enjoyed trying to solve the whodunnit more than any other of the Strike series. What I didn´t like was the unnecessary lengthiness of the novel (reducing the repetitive online abuse in the chatrooms & tweets would have pared 200 pages off the book). I found the Robin/Strike love dynamic tiresome - the trope is becoming distinctively tired. I know more people who have aborted the novel than those who finished it. I liked it, but not a whole lot.

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LibraryThing member diana.hauser

The Ink Black Heart (a Cormoran Strike Novel) is written by Robert Galbraith. (Robert Galbraith is a pen name of JK Rowling.)
It is Book 6 (of 6) titles in the Cormoran Strike series.
What to say? I was blown away by this book. It is a gripping, suspenseful mystery. The complex, detailed characters

and conversations feel so real, so present. The sense of place is excellent - one of my reasons for and great joys of reading.
For me, there are three major plot lines. One is the murder mystery. Two is an inside look at a very well-run, successful, professional detective agency. And three is the complex and (at times) frustrating relationship between Cormoran Strike and his (now) partner in the agency, Robin Ellacott.

A frantic Edie Ledwell begs Robin to take on her ‘case’.
Edie is a co-creator of a very popular cartoon, The Ink Black Heart, and she is being viciously
persecuted by an online figure known only as Anomie. Edie is desperate to find out Anomie’s
true identity.
Robin feels that the agency is overloaded with work and doesn’t have the expertise to take on
an online stalker. But a few days later Robin reads that Edie Ledwell has been tasered and murdered in Highgate Cemetery, the location of The Ink Black Heart.
Robin and partner, Cormoran Strike are drawn into the quest to uncover Anomie’s true identity.
But with a complex web of online aliases, business interests and family conflicts to navigate, Strike and Robin find themselves embroiled in a case that not only stretches their detective smarts, but threatens them in very horrifying ways.

The book is so clever, so well-written, so complex and detailed, and so gripping. I have great
interest in and admiration for the series.

My only criticism is directed NOT to the author, but to the publisher, Mulholland Books.
Much of the book (and the book is a long one 1200+ Kindle pages) consists of online texts. I
could not access them on my (older) Kindle Paperwhite. There was only blank page after blank page of nothingness. After I transferred the book to my computer, I could see the columns of texts but they were extremely hard to read or make sense of. I find this unacceptable.

So, a 5+ Star *****+ rating for writing and a 1 Star * rating for publishing.

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LibraryThing member invisiblelizard

A definite improvement over the last book, that's for sure. My complaint about her Cormoran Strike novels just being an exercise in writing a ton of dialog still stands. But at least a lot more actually happened in this book. And as I headed into the home stretch (which, in this case, equates to

the last 100 pages or so) I literally could not put it down because I needed to know what happened next. As for the plot itself, I found that she released clues to help us readers piece things together at an acceptable rate.

Downsides? Waaaay too many characters to keep track of initially. The first half of the book (the first 500 pages) I could barely keep up. I should have taken notes. What with half of the names being online pseudonyms and the other half just a flurry of IRL names, I couldn't keep things straight. By the end, I'd pretty much sorted everybody out, but this is one book where I swear a character's guide in the beginning would have been a HUGE help.

Let's talk about the formatting. She uses a lot of Twitter(-esque) dialog in here. Tweets and re-tweets and replies to tweets, etc. Also there are chat threads from private chat rooms from a (fictional) online game, and the threads are sometimes 2 or 3 simultaneous chats going on at the same time. She accomplished this by having 2 or 3 columns of these threads printed down the page. [Very minor spoiler here: You do finally find out why it was necessary for her to write those simultaneous chat threads printed in that way, and yes, I'll say it was kind worth it in the end.] All of which made for fine reading, but let me tell you, trying to listen to this audiobook was a real pain. First of all, there was no way to audibly simulate 2 or 3 chat threads going on simultaneously so the poor narrator had to read each one from start to finish. Second, those twitter feeds got hard to listen to quickly, with all of the "at-such-and-such" and "hashtag-this-or-that" the poor guy had to read out loud. I listened to about a third of the book, but I kept going back to the physical copy because this one just needed to be read.

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LibraryThing member indygo88

Cormoran and Robin are back in book #6. Edie Ledwell, co-creator of a popular comic series called The Ink Black Heart, arrives one day in the detective agency, disheveled and somewhat frantic. She tells Robin that she is being harassed by an online persona known as Anomie. Robin graciously explains

that the agency is unable to help due to their backlogged caseload and the nature of Edie's complaint, which Robin feels can be better addressed by another detective agency. Shortly afterward, Edie is found murdered in Highgate Cemetery, and Cormoran and Robin are eventually pulled in to solve the identity of Anomie, who is the suspected murderer.

These Cormoran Strike novels really do just continue to get better and better. It's becoming one of my favorite crime series. True, each book keeps getting longer and longer (which also seemed to be the case in the Harry Potter series) and some reviewers have expressed that some editing is in order, but I have to be honest: every time I put the book down, I was anxious to pick it back up again. I did have trouble keeping track of all the characters, and had I known beforehand how confusing that was going to be, I would've taken notes along the way. (And re-reading my review of the last book, #5, I seemed to have had the same complaint.) These stories do tend to get complicated, but they are so good that I can't really legitimately complain.

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LibraryThing member cbloky

I love how the author gives great detail abot the characters and settings in the book. Even though there is a main case in the book it good how other cases are given minor mention like at a real agency. The continue development of the story outside of the main case is also great so reading the

series fro the beginning dose help, not necessary. I had absolutely no clue this time around on the outcome.

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LibraryThing member DrApple

I loved the previous books in this series, but the investigation into an online community bored me to tears. I especially hated all of the email notations (from soandso @ really long address.com to...).

LibraryThing member malcrf

Another excellent Strike/Ellacott outing and such an unusual plot. JKR is a real master.

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