Read an extract from The Running Grave, the new instalment in the international bestselling series, featuring Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, written by Robert Galbraith, a pseudonym of J K Rowling.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside.
The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organisation that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths.
In order to try to rescue Will, Strike’s business partner Robin Ellacott decides to infiltrate the cult and she travels to Norfolk to live incognito amongst them. But in doing so, she is unprepared for the dangers that await her there or for the toll it will take on her …
EXTRACT
February 2016
Private detective Cormoran Strike was standing in the corner of a small, stuffy, crowded marquee with a wailing baby in his arms.
Heavy rain was falling onto the canvas above, its irregular drumbeat audible even over the chatter of guests and his newly baptised godson’s screams.
The heater at Strike’s back was pumping out too much warmth, but he couldn’t move, because three blonde women, all of whom were around 40 and holding plastic glasses of champagne, had him trapped while taking it in turns to shout questions about his most newsworthy cases. Strike had agreed to hold the baby ‘for a mo’ while the baby’s mother went to the bathroom, but she’d been gone for what felt like an hour.
‘When,’ asked the tallest of the blondes loudly, ‘did you realise it wasn’t suicide?’
‘Took a while,’ Strike shouted back, full of resentment that one of these women wasn’t offering to hold the baby. Surely they knew some arcane female trick that would soothe him? He tried gently bouncing the child up and down in his arms. It shrieked still more bitterly.
Behind the blondes stood a brunette in a shocking pink dress, who Strike had noticed back at the church. She’d talked and giggled loudly from her pew before the service had started, and had drawn a lot of attention to herself by saying ‘aww’ loudly while the holy water was being poured over the sleeping baby’s head, so that half the congregation was looking at her, rather than towards the font.
He tried gently bouncing the child up and down in his arms. It shrieked still more bitterly.
Their eyes now met. Hers were a bright sea-blue, and expertly made up so that they stood out like aquamarines against her olive skin and long dark brown hair. Strike broke eye contact first. Just as the lopsided fascinator and slow reactions of the proud grandmother told Strike she’d already drunk too much, so that glance had told him that the woman in pink was trouble.
‘And the Shacklewell Ripper,’ said the bespectacled blonde, ‘did you actually physically catch him?’
No, I did it all telepathically.
‘Sorry,’ said Strike, because he’d just glimpsed Ilsa, his godson’s mother, through the French doors leading into the kitchen. ‘Need
to give him back to his mum.’
He manoeuvred past the disappointed blondes and the woman in pink and headed out of the marquee, his fellow guests parting before him as though the baby’s wails were a siren.
‘Oh, God, I’m sorry, Corm,’ said fair-haired, bespectacled Ilsa Herbert. She was leaning up against the side talking to Strike’s detective partner Robin Ellacott, and Robin’s boyfriend, CID officer Ryan Murphy. ‘Give him here, he needs a feed. Come with me,’ she added to Robin, ‘we can talk – couldn’t grab me a glass of water, could you, please?
Fucking great, thought Strike, watching Robin walk away to fill a glass at the sink, leaving him alone with Ryan Murphy who, like Strike, was well over six feet tall. There, the resemblance ended.
Unlike the private detective, who resembled a broken-nosed Beethoven, with dark, tightly curling hair and a naturally surly expression, Murphy was classically good looking, with high cheekbones and wavy light brown hair.
Before either man could find a subject of conversation, they were joined by Strike’s old friend Nick Herbert, a gastroenterologist,
and father of the baby who’d just been assaulting Strike’s eardrums. Nick, whose sandy hair had begun receding in his 20s, was
now half bald.
‘So, how’s it feel to have renounced Satan?’ Nick asked Strike.
‘Bit of a wrench, obviously,’ said the detective, ‘but we had a good run.’
Murphy laughed, and so did somebody else, right behind Strike.
He turned: the woman in pink had followed him out of the marquee. Strike’s late Aunt Joan would have thought the pink dress
inappropriate for a christening: a clinging, wraparound affair with a low V neckline and a hemline that showed a lot of tanned leg.
‘I was going to offer to hold the baby,’ she said in a loud, slightly husky voice, smiling up at Strike, who noticed Murphy’s gaze sliding down to the woman’s cleavage and back up to her eyes. ‘I love babies. But then you left.’
‘Wonder what you’re supposed to do with a christening cake?’ said Nick, contemplating the large, uncut slab of iced fruitcake that lay on the island in the middle of the kitchen, topped with a blue teddy bear.‘
Eat it?’ suggested Strike, who was hungry. He’d had only a couple of sandwiches before Ilsa had handed him the baby and, as far as he could see, his fellow guests had demolished most of the available food while he’d been trapped in the marquee. Again, the woman in pink laughed.
‘Yeah, but are there supposed to be pictures taken first, or what?’ said Nick.
‘Pictures,’ said the woman in pink, ‘definitely.’
‘We’ll have to wait, then,’ said Nick. Looking Strike up and down through his wire-rimmed glasses, he asked, ‘How much have you lost now?’
‘Three stone,’ said Strike.
‘Good going,’ said Murphy, slim and fit in his single-breasted suit.
Fuck off, you smug bastard.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joanne Rowling was born on 31st July 1965 and grew up in Gloucestershire in England and in Chepstow, Gwent, in south-east Wales.
The young Jo grew up surrounded by books. ‘I lived for books’,’ she has said. I was your basic common-or-garden bookworm, complete with freckles and National Health spectacles.’
Jo wanted to be a writer from an early age. She wrote her first book at the age of six – a story about a rabbit, called ‘Rabbit’. At just 11, she wrote her first novel – about seven cursed diamonds and the people who owned them.
Jo conceived the idea of Harry Potter in 1990 while sitting on a delayed train from Manchester to London King’s Cross. Over the next five years, she began to map out all seven books of the series.
Having completed the full manuscript, she sent the first three chapters to a number of literary agents, one of whom wrote back asking to see the rest of it. She says it was “the best letter I had ever received in my life.”
The book was first published in June 1997, under the name J K Rowling.
The ‘K’ stands for Kathleen, her paternal grandmother’s name. It was added at her publisher’s request, who thought a book by an obviously female author might not appeal to the target audience of young boys.
In 2001, the film adaptation of the first book was released by Warner Bros., and was followed by six more book adaptations, concluding with the release of the eighth film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, in 2011.
Under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, J K Rowling also writes crime novels, featuring private detective Cormoran Strike.
J K Rowling has been married to Dr Neil Murray since 2001. They live in Edinburgh with their son, David (born 2003) and daughter, Mackenzie (born 2005).
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