The Hallmarked Man - reaction post
Jun. 15th, 2026 07:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessThe Hallmarked Man: Robert Galbraith
I inhaled this, staying up late, reading it instead of being productive, (in less than 48 hours total, I think, which, okay, every chapter is short, but it’s another mammoth tome.) This was a few weeks ago, I’ve been struggling since to wrestle my reactions into something near coherence. I'm deliberately not calling this a review.
I wasn’t sure if it would be the final book in the series, and was starting to think it might be as characters from cases past turned up (spoiler: it’s not. She’d better write a sequel, given where things ended.)
It starts not all that long after the events of the last book. Strike is called upon by Decima Mullins, who is related to people who were connected to Charlotte (hi, Charlotte’s ghost! Clearly, you were too good a device to let go of, which is fine, but everyone dropping ‘What’ is one I could have done without.) Decima wants the agency to prove that a man found murdered in a silver vault wasn’t a known criminal as has been reported, but the father of her secret baby. The police haven’t confirmed 100% that the dead man was who they thought he was, for one thing because identifying body parts were removed, and for other reasons.
Despite some reluctance, because Decima seems vulnerable – his family say her boyfriend moved to the States, although there’s no evidence he did - the Strike and Ellacott Detective Agency take the case on and soon come to see that the Met botched the investigation, and the dead man, who called himself William Wright, could be one of several missing men of the same build, height and age.
The agency has two other big cases on the books, it also has a new subcontractor called Kim, who Robin doesn’t like, as she’s throwing herself at Cormoran, and undermining Robin all the time because she wasn’t an investigative pro before working for the agency. But the partners have not dealt with Cormoran’s declaration about his feelings at the end of the last book. Here it’s presented as if the way he phrased it, tying it to Charlotte, which was meant to be a repudiation of her hold over him, is making it hard for Robin to believe he meant what he said. Cormoran has just returned to London at the start of the novel, having lost his uncle Ted, his father figure, to a stroke.
Quite early on, Robin has a medical emergency, which she downplays/lies about to Cormoran. First, she collapsed in agony and was taken to hospital. Then she learned it was because she’d had an ectopic pregnancy that ended badly, her fallopian tubes were wrecked by chlamydia thanks to the rapist who attacked her when she was a teenager, and her best chances of having children are of freezing her eggs ASAP. She’s already been repressing what happened in the last book (i.e. her time with the cult at Chapman Farm), and she does a lot more repressing as the book goes on, repressing truths about the job from Murphy, who is touchy about Cormoran, touchy about the agency showing up the police, not to mention her mother, who already thinks her job is too dangerous and demanding. Meanwhile, all around her, her friends and family are pregnant, so for a long time, Murphy is the only one who knows about the extreme miscarriage and the reproductive situation, and it’s tough for Robin to communicate her feelings about all that when they’re complicated. It takes repeated, credible threats addressed at her to get off this case and an attack or two for Robin to finally reach out for a therapist.
Cormoran is looking to follow up his declaration, trying to follow Ted’s advice on how to be a man, but his efforts to make himself look good (in contrast with the good-looking boyfriend Murphy), to spend time with Robin – she’s sometimes aware of his manipulations – battle with spectacularly bad timing. Cormoran’s chequered love life (with many glamorous women) is repeatedly brought to the fore as their cases bring them into the orbit of a few exes of his. Furthermore, a journalist with an axe to grind is releasing ‘stories’ about Cormoran’s love life that make the agency looks bad (in Robin’s mum’s eyes, in a subcontractor’s eyes, and in potential clients' eyes). Feeling inadequate, and being given reasons to wonder if Cormoran is telling her the truth (he isn’t) when Bijou returns into their lives (but Robin is being unfair about honesty as she isn’t always honest with him, or Murphy, or herself), Robin withdraws and their relationship deteriorates. The Bijou thing leads Cormoran to turn to…Jonny Rokeby.
Meanwhile, Robin is repeating to herself that she loves Ryan, who is (mostly) supportive, if more keen on moving in together and having children than she is. She thinks she’s successfully supressed her feelings for Cormoran, and put his attempts to keep her onside down to his wanting the agency going. Never mind that she feels safe around him, unburdening herself of some of her pressures in a way she doesn’t with anyone else (and thus ruining the mood when they were finally together uninterrupted outside of London.) Never mind that physical attraction flares up – every now and then, when they get close, he can smell that Robin is wearing the perfume that he bought her. Never mind that when he’s in the vicinity of one of the events of 2017 that British readers will recall, she loses her head in her concern and can’t be sure that she’d react the same way if it had been Ryan.
And then we and Robin gradually learn that there’s another reason that Murphy is so stressed about work, for the short-fuse moments she’s been giving him a bit too much licence for, and that it isn’t just Robin overcompensating for a lack of honesty. For his part, Cormoran, finding his efforts to talk to Robin about his feelings blocked, knows he has only himself to blame for running away from said feelings until it’s too late. By the end of the book, he’s expecting a ring to appear on Robin’s hand. Robin and Cormoran epically misunderstand each other while reading each other aright the rest of the time.
As for the case, it is multifaceted, with the two detectives going over ground the police didn’t – and, okay, in one instance, getting intel from William Wright’s neighbours by virtue of not being the police. The two detectives learn more than they wanted to know about the Freemasons, seeing their symbols everywhere. Strike has a bias against Masons in the police, but is willing to overlook the Masons in the armed forces, which he’ll eventually own up to. One of the potential William Wrights was in the SAS before he had a brain injury.
Another was a mechanic who left his home town after it was rumoured locally he’d caused the death of two contemporaries via a road traffic fatality. Then there’s the man the detectives have been hired to prove was Wright, Rupert Fleetwood, the cousin of Charlotte’s half-brother, which leads to a couple of encounters between Cormoran and people who blame him for Charlotte’s death, although because of her death, he feels less restrained around them. And then there’s a cryptic note that points them to yet another potential Wright who might have been blackmailing a very dangerous man.
Robin is haunted by the case of a Swedish woman who was murdered in Belgium, which has what Cormoran thinks are tenuous similarities/links to the case. Apart from Robin getting warned/threatened/attacked by a man they dub ‘Green Jacket’, MI5 and Shanker are warning them off too. Flirty subcontractor Kim’s discoveries are both helpful and putting strain on everyone.
We get yet another stressful Christmas, with Robin taking Ryan to Masham, where two of her brothers are soon to be fathers. Ryan is welcomed with open arms, while Robin feels smothered and judged, and again bumps into the awful Matthew and Sarah, who are satisfyingly worn down by parenthood and jealousy. Oh, and it was locals who shared information about her and the rape in her past on the internet.
Cormoran has been forced to spend his Christmas with grieving sister Lucy and mercenary brother-in-law Greg, as well as a few people he’s been bored and irritated by in the past. They are mostly parents, and their loud offspring are around too. Both Robin and Cormoran get drunk at different points during the festive holiday. He’s the one who probably gives the most thoughtful gift of the two of them, which haunts them both, and Robin ends up hiding it (along with a few case-related things) from Ryan.
Strike’s stump gets put under enormous strain, and he gets injured twice during this case. Robin has reason to be carrying home-made pepper spray around with her. The case is pretty gruesome, first in the slow reveal of what was done to the original corpse, then Strike finds more bodies in a terrible condition, and of course there are sex crimes. Oh, and animal cruelty.
I inhaled this, staying up late, reading it instead of being productive, (in less than 48 hours total, I think, which, okay, every chapter is short, but it’s another mammoth tome.) This was a few weeks ago, I’ve been struggling since to wrestle my reactions into something near coherence. I'm deliberately not calling this a review.
I wasn’t sure if it would be the final book in the series, and was starting to think it might be as characters from cases past turned up (spoiler: it’s not. She’d better write a sequel, given where things ended.)
It starts not all that long after the events of the last book. Strike is called upon by Decima Mullins, who is related to people who were connected to Charlotte (hi, Charlotte’s ghost! Clearly, you were too good a device to let go of, which is fine, but everyone dropping ‘What’ is one I could have done without.) Decima wants the agency to prove that a man found murdered in a silver vault wasn’t a known criminal as has been reported, but the father of her secret baby. The police haven’t confirmed 100% that the dead man was who they thought he was, for one thing because identifying body parts were removed, and for other reasons.
Despite some reluctance, because Decima seems vulnerable – his family say her boyfriend moved to the States, although there’s no evidence he did - the Strike and Ellacott Detective Agency take the case on and soon come to see that the Met botched the investigation, and the dead man, who called himself William Wright, could be one of several missing men of the same build, height and age.
The agency has two other big cases on the books, it also has a new subcontractor called Kim, who Robin doesn’t like, as she’s throwing herself at Cormoran, and undermining Robin all the time because she wasn’t an investigative pro before working for the agency. But the partners have not dealt with Cormoran’s declaration about his feelings at the end of the last book. Here it’s presented as if the way he phrased it, tying it to Charlotte, which was meant to be a repudiation of her hold over him, is making it hard for Robin to believe he meant what he said. Cormoran has just returned to London at the start of the novel, having lost his uncle Ted, his father figure, to a stroke.
Quite early on, Robin has a medical emergency, which she downplays/lies about to Cormoran. First, she collapsed in agony and was taken to hospital. Then she learned it was because she’d had an ectopic pregnancy that ended badly, her fallopian tubes were wrecked by chlamydia thanks to the rapist who attacked her when she was a teenager, and her best chances of having children are of freezing her eggs ASAP. She’s already been repressing what happened in the last book (i.e. her time with the cult at Chapman Farm), and she does a lot more repressing as the book goes on, repressing truths about the job from Murphy, who is touchy about Cormoran, touchy about the agency showing up the police, not to mention her mother, who already thinks her job is too dangerous and demanding. Meanwhile, all around her, her friends and family are pregnant, so for a long time, Murphy is the only one who knows about the extreme miscarriage and the reproductive situation, and it’s tough for Robin to communicate her feelings about all that when they’re complicated. It takes repeated, credible threats addressed at her to get off this case and an attack or two for Robin to finally reach out for a therapist.
Cormoran is looking to follow up his declaration, trying to follow Ted’s advice on how to be a man, but his efforts to make himself look good (in contrast with the good-looking boyfriend Murphy), to spend time with Robin – she’s sometimes aware of his manipulations – battle with spectacularly bad timing. Cormoran’s chequered love life (with many glamorous women) is repeatedly brought to the fore as their cases bring them into the orbit of a few exes of his. Furthermore, a journalist with an axe to grind is releasing ‘stories’ about Cormoran’s love life that make the agency looks bad (in Robin’s mum’s eyes, in a subcontractor’s eyes, and in potential clients' eyes). Feeling inadequate, and being given reasons to wonder if Cormoran is telling her the truth (he isn’t) when Bijou returns into their lives (but Robin is being unfair about honesty as she isn’t always honest with him, or Murphy, or herself), Robin withdraws and their relationship deteriorates. The Bijou thing leads Cormoran to turn to…Jonny Rokeby.
Meanwhile, Robin is repeating to herself that she loves Ryan, who is (mostly) supportive, if more keen on moving in together and having children than she is. She thinks she’s successfully supressed her feelings for Cormoran, and put his attempts to keep her onside down to his wanting the agency going. Never mind that she feels safe around him, unburdening herself of some of her pressures in a way she doesn’t with anyone else (and thus ruining the mood when they were finally together uninterrupted outside of London.) Never mind that physical attraction flares up – every now and then, when they get close, he can smell that Robin is wearing the perfume that he bought her. Never mind that when he’s in the vicinity of one of the events of 2017 that British readers will recall, she loses her head in her concern and can’t be sure that she’d react the same way if it had been Ryan.
And then we and Robin gradually learn that there’s another reason that Murphy is so stressed about work, for the short-fuse moments she’s been giving him a bit too much licence for, and that it isn’t just Robin overcompensating for a lack of honesty. For his part, Cormoran, finding his efforts to talk to Robin about his feelings blocked, knows he has only himself to blame for running away from said feelings until it’s too late. By the end of the book, he’s expecting a ring to appear on Robin’s hand. Robin and Cormoran epically misunderstand each other while reading each other aright the rest of the time.
As for the case, it is multifaceted, with the two detectives going over ground the police didn’t – and, okay, in one instance, getting intel from William Wright’s neighbours by virtue of not being the police. The two detectives learn more than they wanted to know about the Freemasons, seeing their symbols everywhere. Strike has a bias against Masons in the police, but is willing to overlook the Masons in the armed forces, which he’ll eventually own up to. One of the potential William Wrights was in the SAS before he had a brain injury.
Another was a mechanic who left his home town after it was rumoured locally he’d caused the death of two contemporaries via a road traffic fatality. Then there’s the man the detectives have been hired to prove was Wright, Rupert Fleetwood, the cousin of Charlotte’s half-brother, which leads to a couple of encounters between Cormoran and people who blame him for Charlotte’s death, although because of her death, he feels less restrained around them. And then there’s a cryptic note that points them to yet another potential Wright who might have been blackmailing a very dangerous man.
Robin is haunted by the case of a Swedish woman who was murdered in Belgium, which has what Cormoran thinks are tenuous similarities/links to the case. Apart from Robin getting warned/threatened/attacked by a man they dub ‘Green Jacket’, MI5 and Shanker are warning them off too. Flirty subcontractor Kim’s discoveries are both helpful and putting strain on everyone.
We get yet another stressful Christmas, with Robin taking Ryan to Masham, where two of her brothers are soon to be fathers. Ryan is welcomed with open arms, while Robin feels smothered and judged, and again bumps into the awful Matthew and Sarah, who are satisfyingly worn down by parenthood and jealousy. Oh, and it was locals who shared information about her and the rape in her past on the internet.
Cormoran has been forced to spend his Christmas with grieving sister Lucy and mercenary brother-in-law Greg, as well as a few people he’s been bored and irritated by in the past. They are mostly parents, and their loud offspring are around too. Both Robin and Cormoran get drunk at different points during the festive holiday. He’s the one who probably gives the most thoughtful gift of the two of them, which haunts them both, and Robin ends up hiding it (along with a few case-related things) from Ryan.
Strike’s stump gets put under enormous strain, and he gets injured twice during this case. Robin has reason to be carrying home-made pepper spray around with her. The case is pretty gruesome, first in the slow reveal of what was done to the original corpse, then Strike finds more bodies in a terrible condition, and of course there are sex crimes. Oh, and animal cruelty.
