The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith review: JK Rowling's Strike faces the social media trolls

If one were to judge from the online reactions to her socio-political views, everybody in the world thinks JK Rowling is either a demigod or the Antichrist. I suspect that beyond the social media bubble, however, the vast majority of her readers, who couldn’t care less what she thinks about anything, are making more complex judgments. Certainly, this sixth instalment in her pseudonymous series – published under the name “Robert Galbraith” – about the brooding private detective Cormoran Strike will have her readers chiding and blessing her simultaneously almost as soon as they open it.

All but the stoniest-hearted will curse Rowling for teasingly manoeuvring Strike and his comely business partner Robin into position for the long-awaited clinch in the opening pages, only for it to be aborted. But then, all but the stoniest-brained will know that she’s done the right thing: from Moonlighting to Frasier, a definitive answer to the question of will-they-won’t-they sounds a long-running series’s death knell.

So we’re rapidly back to business as usual – Strike and Robin trying to suppress their passion for each other as they collaborate on the solving of gruesome murders. First up in the parade of corpses is Edie Ledwell, co-creator of a popular YouTube cartoon called The Ink Black Heart, who is found knifed to death in Highgate Cemetery.

The downside of fame has been the central theme of this series from the start, but even so Rowling has never outlined the corrosive effect of becoming public property at quite this level of grim detail. The creator of Harry Potter details the disastrous consequences that have followed from disgruntled elements of “the fandom” – the kidult devotees of the cartoon – denouncing Ledwell for selling out or, worse, allowing her dubious views to pollute her work.

When we learn that Ledwell has been subject to claims of plagiarism, or that her fantasy characters have been accused of embodying racist or ableist tropes, we don’t have to ask where Rowling gets her ideas from. There’s a gag about Social Justice Warriors decreeing that a talking worm in the cartoon is a transphobic dig at “non-binary kids” because it’s a hermaphrodite – a joke you can look on as defiant or inflammatory according to taste.

More seriously, Rowling gives her readers a good whiff of the social media sewer that forms the backdrop to any female celebrity’s life these days – the death threats, the graphic “jokes” about raping women who have the temerity to express opinions, the posting online of photos of their homes in order to muster protesters. As Strike and Robin investigate Ledwell’s murder, they discover that the disaffected fans have been whipped into a frenzy by people with ulterior motives – but are the fandom the useful idiots of those groups who wish to sow division and misogyny for their own political ends, or simply being manipulated by somebody with a personal grudge against Ledwell?

There is plenty of material here for Rowling’s admirers and detractors to scrap over, but what complex judgement will the open-minded reader make? It is impossible not to enjoy these novels as good comforting crime fiction with a pair of white-knight heroes setting things to rights, rigorous plots with even the odd anagram to solve, and yet enough engagement with the real world to stave off insipidity; but it is hard not to wonder why the later volumes have to be more than 1,000 pages long, when they don’t seem to have more depth, or to cover more emotional territory, than the earlier ones did at half the length. It would help if the wafflier sentences were pruned, and although the proliferation of subplots adds to the book’s charms, did we really need, after 700 pages, the late introduction of a comedy storyline about Strike’s reluctant attempts to lose weight on account of his missing leg? No doubt Rowling overstuffs her books now out of a desire not to short-change the reader, but if you think of the tauter, pacier books earlier in the series, a little short-changed is what you may feel.

The Ink Black Heart is published by Sphere at £25. To order your copy for £19.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books