I’d like to start off this
review by saying that I’ve definitely been putting off reading and reviewing Career of Evil for quite a while, not
because I didn’t like The Cuckoo’s
Calling and The Silkworm, I loved
both of those books. The reason I’ve been putting off reading Career of Evil is because I found Paula Hawkins’ book The Girl on the Train to be a rather challenging book to review. When I review
something, I really like to talk about it in great detail, but since that book
is a mystery novel, I was really unsure of how to approach writing a review for
it, and it’s definitely the same thing with this book. Books in the mystery
genre are definitely one kind of book that I don’t think a person should have a
ton of details about the overall plot of the book and especially the end of the
book ruined for them before they read it. I’m really going to try and find the
right balance between discussing my thoughts on this book, while hopefully not
giving too much away in case anybody who reads this review hasn’t read Career of Evil yet; that being said,
here are my thoughts on Career of Evil.
When it comes to Career of Evil, my overall reading
experience with the book was definitely very weird. The reason I say that is
because I started out absolutely loving the book and thinking that it had
potential to be the best book yet in the Cormoran
Strike series, only to have my thoughts on the book to take a turn for the
worse the further into the book that I got. I’ll start this review off on a
positive note and say that I love that Robin was so personally affected by the
case they were trying to solve in this book, which involved an unknown person
sending Robin a woman’s leg in the mail, and Strike and Robin trying to figure
out whose leg it was and who sent it.
Maybe this will sound weird
to some people, but reading Career of
Evil really made me think a lot about the TV show Desperate Housewives and how the season mysteries were the most
interesting when at least one, if not all of the women, were involved with the
mystery in some way. In my opinion, the show definitely suffered in season two
due to the fact that the whole mystery with Betty Applewhite was so completely
splintered off from the show’s core housewives for the most part, but I
digress.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm, and neither Strike and
Robin were all that connected on a personal level to the cases in those books.
However, having Robin be so connected to the case they were trying to solve in
this book really contributed a lot to my enjoyment of the book. It also gave
Robert Galbraith/J.K. Rowling the chance to really continue to develop Robin as
a character even more in this book. Robin definitely has a very sad past when
it comes to the fact that it was revealed that Robin was raped when she was in
college, which subsequently led to her developing a case of agoraphobia and
leaving college. That whole reveal definitely helped me to understand Robin as
a character even more than I did before. I also found Strike’s reaction to this
reveal and how it impacted their relationship throughout the book rather
compelling, especially in terms of the drama that it caused between them.
