Robert Galbraith

The Ink Black Heart

Denaiir

amazing as usual, but don't listen to it on audio if possible, the chat transcripts were not fun to listen to.... the narrator has to pronounce the name of each participant in the conversation so it is quite annoying
I can't do justice to this book with a short review, but if you like the Strike series, you're in for a treat. Well done again, can't wait for the next one

Ipek

It was good, not as good as the previous one, Troubled Blood, which was very nearly perfect, but still good. Anyway, the sad thing about our age I think, which this novel really brought to the fore, is that we live on the internet and if that's where you pour your energy in, where you really place your heart, then it makes for such insipid, one-dimensional incidents and encounters, the sum total of which then go on to constitute our lives. "I saw that he wrote x, and then he liked y's post, but then when I went back to look y had set her profile to private..." seriously, this is the stuff that people talk about at cafes and public transport now, as you must have noticed. People are talking not about other people, per se, but the digital activities of those people, and of themselves concerning those people. This is the remove at which human relations take place now, and perhaps at its heart a life is a life is a life no matter the surrounding circumstances, but such blandness, and such little space for the pleasantly surprising, the serendipitous, the adventurous on the internet... And everything on record, in the public eye. The book feels grim because the digital experience it captures is grim; things happen online, so you investigate them online, and real people are dying in real life, but at the same time it feels so unreal because the lives of these people take place mostly online. Parts of the previous novel, Troubled Blood, are set in the seventies, and I wonder if that's where some of its brilliancy came from. I miss the real world, and the digital one feels like no friend to fiction.

The Ink Black Heart

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