Troubled Blood

The fifth installment in the Cormoran Strike series opens in August 2013 with private detective Cormoran Strike visiting his aunt Joan and uncle Ted in the Cornish seaside town of St. Mawes. Joan has just been diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. While celebrating his oldest friend Dave Polworth's birthday at the local pub, Strike is approached by Anna Phipps, who explains that her mother, Dr. Margot Bamborough, vanished in 1974 after walking out of her GP practice in Clerkenwell and never arriving at a nearby pub to meet a friend. A medium told Anna she would receive a sign leading her to the truth, and seeing the famous detective felt like the promised omen. Strike agrees to meet Anna and her wife, psychologist Dr. Kim Sullivan, the following day.

Meanwhile, Strike's business partner Robin Ellacott is conducting solo surveillance in Torquay, having discovered that a client's husband is a bigamist with two families and a pregnant mistress. Robin is exhausted and mired in a bitter divorce from her estranged husband, Matthew Cunliffe. She drives to Falmouth to pick up Strike, and together they meet Anna and Kim. Anna reveals she grew up believing her stepmother Cynthia was her real mother and only learned the truth at eleven. Her father, Roy Phipps, refuses to discuss Margot and would be furious to learn about the investigation. Despite slim odds, Strike and Robin agree to investigate for one year.

Back in London, the agency juggles multiple cases with a small team: office manager Pat Chauncey and subcontractors Sam Barclay, Andy Hutchins, and Saul Morris. Strike reads about Dennis Creed, a serial killer known as the Essex Butcher who murdered seven women in the 1960s and 1970s and was long suspected of abducting Margot. Detective Inspector George Layborn, whose father worked the original case, secures them a copy of the forty-year-old police file.

Strike interviews retired Dr. Dinesh Gupta, Margot's partner at the St. John's practice. Gupta describes Margot as a vivid feminist who clashed with the misogynistic third GP, Dr. Joseph Brenner, and recalls the day she vanished: an ordinary Friday disrupted only by a last-minute emergency patient called Theo, a dark, stocky figure whose sex the staff disputed. Gloria Conti, the young receptionist, was the last known person to see Margot alive. Strike and Robin walk Margot's route through Clerkenwell, cataloging sightings and possible abduction points. They discover that the lead investigator, DI Bill Talbot, had a mental breakdown during the case, filling a private notebook with astrological symbols and occult references while genuine leads went unrecorded. Talbot's son Gregory gives Strike the notebook, which Strike spends weeks deciphering.

The investigation unfolds across a year of personal upheaval. Joan's health declines through chemotherapy, and she dies in the new year after Strike and his half-sister Lucy make a harrowing journey through flooded Cornwall to reach her bedside. Strike's half-brother Al repeatedly texts asking him to attend a Deadbeats anniversary party and sit for a family photograph; Strike refuses. His ex-fiancée Charlotte Campbell sends increasingly desperate messages, including a drunken late-night call and a nude photograph, before Strike finally severs the connection by changing his number. Robin contends with Morris's unwanted advances, a contentious divorce, and the psychological toll of reading about Creed's crimes, which triggers echoes of her own past trauma: a rape she survived at university.

Strike and Robin systematically interview everyone connected to Margot. Oonagh Kennedy, Margot's best friend, reveals that Margot was trapped in an unhappy marriage and had called just before disappearing, needing advice about something she could not discuss openly. Receptionist Irene Hickson and nurse Janice Beattie are interviewed together: Irene is spiteful toward Margot's memory, while Janice seems warm and fair-minded; both reveal details about threatening notes Margot received. A visit to Broom House, the Phipps family home, produces an emotional confrontation: Roy breaks down, confessing he had been punishing Margot with silence when she disappeared. Robin tracks Margot's ex-boyfriend Paul Satchwell to an art exhibition in Warwickshire, where he reveals his so-called pillow dream, a childhood memory of his mother suffocating his older sister, who had a severe disability. Margot had used this secret as leverage to recover compromising photographs Satchwell took of her. He accuses Janice of trying to implicate him and claims Margot disliked the nurse, contradicting Janice's account.

A tense Valentine's Day dinner at Robin's flat escalates into Strike and Robin's worst personal clash when Strike arrives drunk and combative. Robin confronts him in the street, accusing him of taking her for granted. His unprecedented apology the next day marks a turning point: Strike tells Robin she is the best he has, and the declaration clears the air between them.

Robin secretly arranges for Strike to interview Creed at Broadmoor, the high-security psychiatric hospital. Strike manipulates the egotistical killer into confessing to the murder of Louise Tucker, another suspected victim, then stuns Creed by revealing that Margot was killed by someone far more skillful. Robin deciphers Creed's cryptic clue about Louise's burial site, connecting a star cluster designation to the Archer Hotel in Islington. Meanwhile, Strike finds Steve Douthwaite, Margot's anxious former patient, living under an assumed name in Skegness. Strike later calls Douthwaite and reconstructs his final appointment: Margot warned him to stop eating anything Janice prepared because the nurse had been poisoning him. Douthwaite confirms this.

The converging evidence points toward Janice. Robin discovers that threatening notes sent to Margot match handwriting she photographed during a covert visit to a nursing home connected to local gangster Niccolo "Mucky" Ricci, whose son Luca had terrorized Gloria. Strike realizes Janice fabricated every alibi: she blackmailed the barbiturate-addicted Brenner into signing for drugs she used in her own crimes, invented a social worker persona to control access to the flat of Gwilherm Athorn, a vulnerable man whose family she manipulated for decades, and wove an elaborate web of misdirection to conceal the body hidden inside the flat. Robin and Barclay break open an oversized ottoman in the Athorn home and discover a body encased in concrete.

Strike confronts Janice at her house, arriving just in time to stop her from poisoning herself. Janice confesses to murders spanning decades, beginning with a neighborhood boy she killed at age eight. She murdered Douthwaite's girlfriend with weedkiller, drowned a young woman at a holiday camp, and poisoned her own partner and his mistress. Her motive for killing Margot was possessive love for Douthwaite: Margot was treating him, he was confiding in the doctor, and Margot had begun to suspect the nurse of poisoning. On the day of the murder, Janice injected barbiturates into a doughnut she knew Margot would eat, watched from a phone box as the drugged doctor staggered past, guided her into the Athorn flat, and suffocated her. She encased the body in concrete overnight and manipulated the drug-addled Gwilherm, the Athorn family's father, into believing his own magical abilities had caused Margot's death.

The discovery of both Margot and Louise Tucker brings widespread press attention and deep relief for the families. Anna tells Strike and Robin that Margot's locket, found in the concrete, contained a perfectly preserved photograph of baby Anna. At Joan's funeral, Strike is moved by the dark pink roses Robin sent on the agency's behalf: Joan's favorite flowers.

On Robin's thirtieth birthday, Strike surprises her with a balloon shaped like a donkey's head, a reference to her childhood love of seaside donkey rides, then takes her to Liberty to choose a perfume and on to the Ritz for champagne. As they walk together through the golden evening, Strike privately recalls a Tolstoy quotation about marriage that Polworth once shared, and the corners of his mouth twitch in a smile he keeps to himself.