A part of the Cormoran Strike crime series, Troubled Blood is by Robert Galbraith, the pseudonym of J. K. Rowling of the Harry Potter fame. The series, that kicked off with Cuckoo Calling which reached No. 1 bestseller status in UK, are the cases of the private detective Cormoran Strike and his partner the lady detective Robin Elcott. Troubled Blood was also adjudged the Book of the Year by the British Book Awards.

Troubled Blood has a real interesting concept as detectives Strike and Robin are given the assignment of finding out what happened to Dr. Margot Bamborough who had disappeared without a trace 40 years ago, by the doctor’s daughter who was a little child when her mother disappeared and now is a middle aged woman. Though the detectives and even the daughter know that there is very little chance of unearthing the truth after forty years, they are determined to try their best and embark on a massive hunt, painstakingly going through volumes of data of from all the police records from and interviewing any who are still living and had any connection to Dr. Bamborough or their children if they had passed away. This massive task unveils some startling facts and the final revelation has a superb unexpected twist.

However, though the idea is gripping and unique, the telling is a bit slow and winding. A whole lot of details that have no relevance to the main plot make you forget the main story at times. Like delving into the personal lives of both the detectives. Which is good for creating a human persona for the detectives so that you feel you know them intimately, but the details to which it goes detracts from the main story and the novel could be shorter and tighter. Also the quotations at the beginning of each chapter from Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queen, that too in old English, do not have much relevance except showing off the author’s scholarship. However the final denouement compensates for these short comings and is a good read for aficionados of crime fiction.