The Running Grave - You Terrible Cults
The latest Cormoran Strike novel centres around the infiltration of a religious cult. And bugger me if it doesn't do a great job of getting a lot of things just right.
As a big of fan of the Robert Galbraith Cormoran Strike cycle, I’d been counting down the days until The Running Grave hit the shelves. And with the book running to a similar length to Moby-Dick, what robust shelves they were!
If The Running Grave is as much tome as page-turner, it’s arguably the series’ finest outing to date. For with a wealthy client having hired the world’s finest one-legged detective to persuade a wayward child to leave a religious group, it falls to Strike’s resourceful right-hand woman Robin Ellacott to infiltrate The Universal Humanitarian Church or UHC, an organisation part-Manson Family, part-Moonies and more than a little similar to Scientology.
To say much more would be to spoil any number of surprises. However, it’s hard not to be impressed with just how good a job the author does of pinning down the ridiculousness of cult life. Not that there aren’t a wide variety of documentaries, TV series and non-fiction books available on the matter at hand. It’s in acknowledging the seemingly petty absurdities of life within a charismatic religious body that The Running Grave scores over those works that ignore evil when it’s at its most banal.
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