The Ink Black Heart

Bottom line: terrific! Storytelling at its best. Once again, this is a very long book that I did not want to end. There are two main aspects to the story. Robin and Cormoran remain the reason why you will read this series. And they are the reason why the series must be read in order. Their relationship and their characters continue to grow and evolve. I do not know people like Robin and Cormoran, but the characters are well-developed, three-dimensional, and they feel true. In this book, the other secondary characters also begin to claim more space and development. The second part of the story is the mystery. The investigation is centered on a cartoon that inspired a fan-designed video game, and the fans of the game. The game is strange, and the fans are stranger. The nature of the online chat both within the game and outside supports the origin of the term trolls for those who use the anonymity of the internet to harass and bully. The investigation is complex and interesting. This is a book for adult readers. If it were a movie, it would be rated R for language, sex, and violence.Warning: Much has been said in the reviews about the Kindle edition of this book and those reviews are correct. There is no excuse for producing a book where many pages are not legible on Kindle. The problem mainly is with some of the in-game chat threads which are in a microscopic font-size and oddly formatted so that even if you can adjust your brightness and expand the font, some words appear above the margin of the Kindle page. Is it irritating? Yes. Does it destroy the story? No. I had no difficulty following the investigation and the plot even without being able to read those parts. There are more of those pages at the beginning than there are throughout the book, so forge on. Perhaps the complaints will make it less likely that such formatting disaster will happen again. The author devoted attention to those pages, many of us paid full price for the book, and to be unable to read a significant percentage is not acceptable. J.K. Rowling deserves better and so do we.

The physical book is much easier to read, plus paging back and forth works much better. Yes, the Kindle formatting is problematic due to the 3-up text messages. I have both.About halfway through I got frustrated by all the character names and userids, so I bought the physical book to help take notes of who's who. It's much easier to page back and forth in a real book. Ironically, at that point either my note-writing helped me with all the characters, or it didn't matter anymore as new names eased up. I never referenced my notes.JK Rowling, like Hollywood blockbuster writers, thinks that bigger is better. For Harry Potter, I'd say yes. But for detective stories, I'd say it's just more clutter. Honestly, this book is 1,012 pages long. There's a difference between building suspense and jerking readers around.But I made it! I finished the book and rate it a three-star detective story, but give a bonus point because of the story within the story. The Ink Black Heart sub-story really intriguing. The more the characters are described, the more I wish I could actually see them. It's such a richly-defined world I truly wish it existed in real life. Maybe it will. Personally, I'd rather see an Ink Black Heart movie than another Fantastic Beasts.Did JKR add 12-year-old Flavia as an homage to Flavia de Luce? If so, it's not a good idea, because I dearly love that series and it made me wish there was a new book.I also disagree with the solution to the mystery. I have a different one in my mind that seems more plausible. It's as if JKR wrote multiple endings and then picked one. Maybe the book is more like real detective work than I realize, but the ratio of red herrings and dead-ends to actual plot is too high. This book is a tough slog.For example, at one point there was a line about a father and daughter that I didn't recall reading. In the physical book I went back several pages and still did not find it, so I used my Kindle version to seek out the words. Once found (in the 3-up messages), I went back to the book and then had to look at the handles of two characters to figure out what Strike was talking about. Part of me thought the bit was clever, but part of me thought, "am I supposed to read every character in the text messages?"If I hadn't been invested in the series due to the previous books, I'm not sure I could have stuck this one out. The sheer density of writing and creativity is impressive, but It's just too complicated.

Neesa resenha irei falar sobre o livro e sobre sua edição.A narrativa do livro é intrigante como sempre. A escritora traz na obra uma leitura interessante sobre o comportamento e consequências das mídias sociais e do fato das pessoas se autopromoverem e ao mesmo tempo manter o anonimato nessa interação completamente virtual. Se você está esperando romance, vai ver muito pouco seu desenvolvimento neste livro. Acredito que a autora também está buscando desenvolver os persoagens até que se efetive ou não o relacionamento amoroso. Gosto de ver a Robin se desenvolvendo e se descobrindo, assim como o Strike amadurecendo.Sobre a edição do livro, ficou muito ruim com os chats. Dá pra entender a escolha da forma, mas é um pouco difícil de digerir na leitura.

Difficult to read the on-line conversations on the novel. Poor formatting for the Kindle. Has this been corrected?

Este libro mantiene la tensión y es verosímil. Nada forzado.No pude leerlo en el kindle paperwhite; las conversaciones en el juego tienen la letra tan pequeña que tuve que utilizar una tableta para leerlos

Oh, I am little biased when it comes to the C B Strike novel series. I absolutely love each and every book of this series. This one’s is also a really good read.

cant believe shes done it again ... the 6th in the series was the best so far, complicated? yes, bit really well conceived and develped ... and comes the 7th and again, the best robin-cormoran so far ... and so appropriate with present times of fake news, flat earthers and climate negationists ...