A detective novel that weighs in at nearly 1,000 pages is, among other things, a declaration of self-confidence by the storyteller. Maintaining the reader’s interest and sustaining the necessary suspense in a story of that length are feats that would test any novelist, even one with the bona fides of J.K. Rowling (writing here under her pseudonym, Robert Galbraith). Does she pull it off? Mostly, yes, but the author or her editor could have pruned the manuscript quite hard without damaging the overall story.

Troubled Blood is the fifth in the Cormoran Strike series and the pattern is well established by now. On this outing Strike and his partner/love interest take on a cold case, the mysterious disappearance more than forty years earlier of a London doctor, Margot Bamborough. It’s a complicated yarn with the usual large parade of potential suspects and, on this occasion, a plot layer of astrological nonsense that I found very irritating. The best part of this series is the central character and his growing affection for his sidekick, Robin Ellacott, so I was pleased to see Galbraith giving plenty of attention to that side of the story. Troubled Blood, like the others in the Strike series, is undemanding, entertaining fodder, and firmly within a distinctively English tradition of whodunits.