In October I treated myself to the new book in the Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith (see my previous blogs on the rest of the series so far: The Ink Black Heart, Lethal White, Career of Evil, The Silkworm, The Cuckoo’s Calling, Troubled Blood and The Running Grave), The Hallmarked Man. As ever, I wanted to know where things were at between private investigators Strike and Robin, both in love with each other and refusing to admit it to themselves or each other.

This love story runs over 900 pages and has to take a back seat whilst a murder is solved, with as usual a bewildering array of possibilities, this time both in terms of the murderer and who the body belongs to. Strike and Robin make their way up and down the country, acquiring a new land-rover for Robin in the process, and even go as far as Sark in the Channel Islands (which I visited aged 16 – a weird experience of a beautiful and insular place with tractors and horse and carts the only form of transport) tracking down possibilities.

All the while Robin is faithfully standing by her increasingly irritating boyfriend Murphy, refusing to listen to her heart or acknowledge that the right thing might not be loyalty, duty and trapping herself back in the same situation she rightly ran from her marriage to escape. Strike is as incompetent as ever in declaring his feelings, only managing to get right an excellent choice of Christmas present. The build up to the end is delicious and by that point I couldn’t have cared less who the body or the killer were, and now I can’t believe I have to wait another year or two to find out what happens after the emotional denouement.