![Career of Evil]()
Synopsis:
When a mysterious package is delivered to Robin Ellacott, she is horrified to discover that it contains a woman’s severed leg.
Her boss, private detective Cormoran Strike, is less surprised but no less alarmed. There are four people from his past who he thinks could be responsible–and Strike knows that any one of them is capable of sustained and unspeakable brutality.
With the police focusing on the one suspect Strike is increasingly sure is not the perpetrator, he and Robin take matters into their own hands, and delve into the dark and twisted worlds of the other three men. But as more horrendous acts occur, time is running out for the two of them…
Career of Evil is the third in the highly acclaimed series featuring private detective Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin Ellacott. A fiendishly clever mystery with unexpected twists around every corner, it is also a gripping story of a man and a woman at a crossroads in their personal and professional lives.
My Rank: 5 stars
To say that I liked Career of Evil would be a gross understatement. I freakin’ loved it. The sort of love that leaves you shaking after the final page — that sort of love.
By far my favorite in the Cormoran Strike series, Career of Evil is more thriller than detective, which is one of the big reasons why I enjoyed it so much more than the other two. (I’ve always had a lukewarm relationship with detective/murder mysteries.) But it isn’t just the burning desire to unveil the sadistic killer that makes this book delightful. It’s the ‘ordinary’ characters. The growing camaraderie and building tension of unspoken desires between Strike and Robin, the manipulative, controlling, possessive undercurrents of Matthew, the smelly old Land Rover, the inviting pubs with their beer-battered fish and chips … Galbraith paints a vivid picture of characters and setting with one seriously creepy plot and hits a home run.
Favorite Lines:
“All right, who d’you know who likes chopping up corpses and sending them through the post?”
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A woman had died in what were likely to have been terrible, brutal circumstances, and nobody seemed to care as much as Robin did. Death and a hatchet had reduced the unknown female to a lump of meat, a problem to be solves and she, Robin, felt as through she was the only person to remember that a living, breathing human being had been using that leg, perhaps as recently as a week ago…
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This, he thought, was how women roped you in. They added you to lists and forced you to confirm and commit. They impressed upon you that if you didn’t show up a plate of hot food would go begging, a gold-backed chair would remain unoccupied, a cardboard place name would sit shamefully upon a table, announcing your rudeness to the world.
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