Troubled Blood, by JK Rowling
2.0 Stars
9-15-2020

I decided to try this out, in order to see what sort of atrocity Rowling is perpetrating now. Initially I was impressed by the book; the writing was fine, the descriptions were good, and it had slow and detailed character interactions and dialog that I was not expecting from a mystery novel. I'm used to mass-market mystery novels being extremely low quality, with fan-fic level writing and card-board cutout characters and a constant stream of lumpenprole thought-patterns and prurient sex and murder and crime. So in that regard, Troubled Blood was a big step up, as the writing was not actively bad and off-putting, and just in general it felt more humane and well thought out But then I started to have doubts. About 150 pages in, I started to realize that nothing had actually happened in this book, that the investigation was just barely getting started, that I didn't really care about the characters, and that there was still *800 pages* left in this ultra-long mystery novel. So... maybe the more standard mystery writers actually do know a thing or two about their craft. Give the reader something, anything, to hook them into your novel. I think in this regard Rowling might have been spoiled by her Harry Potter success, and at a certain level she just assumes that people will read 1000 pages by her, because what else are they going to do, *not* read the next installment of her work? But outside of the huge success of the Harry Potter main-line stories, yes, that's exactly what people are going to do. Anyway I gave up on the book around the ~150 page mark.