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Journalism of Courage
The Hallmarked Man Review: By the eighth outing in the Cormoran Strike series, Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling under a pseudonym) shows no sign of exhaustion. The Hallmarked Man, a 912-page behemoth, is both an expansive crime novel and an intimate psychological study, its heft matched by its ambitions.
The hook is deceptively simple: a dismembered body found in the vault of a Covent Garden silversmith, believed by the police to belong to a convicted robber. Their client, however, is convinced it is her missing partner. From this seed grows a narrative, sprawling across multiple missing-persons cases, each with its own tragic history, until the reader, like Strike and Robin, struggles to discern whose story the corpse is actually telling.
What distinguishes The Hallmarked Man from its predecessors is Galbraith’s sophisticated approach to misdirection. In a masterful sleight of hand, each missing man carries enough echoes to keep the detectives, and us, guessing.
The Masonic elements are not sensationalist gimmickry but textured atmosphere. Galbraith uses Freemasonry’s secrecy to heighten the novel’s claustrophobia. The Murdoch silver collection, central to the case, is no mere MacGuffin, it lends cultural and historical weight.
The heart of the novel is Robin Ellacott. Through the series, she has been stalked, raped, belittled, underestimated. Galbraith unsparingly depicts the cost of being a woman in a man’s world. Yet, Robin is no saintly victim. Part of what makes her so compelling is her capacity for mess. She strings along her partner Ryan Murphy, allowing him to believe they are moving towards a shared domestic future even as she inwardly recoils at house viewings.
She cannot bring herself to be honest about her lack of desire for marriage or children, and then turns her frustration outward, blaming Strike for his long silence when she hasn’t been any different. This refusal to grant Robin tidy nobility, her flaws, evasions and self-deceptions, make her feel real.
The Hallmarked Man shows trauma is not an event neatly overcome but keeps returning as a loop of sleeplessness, intrusive thoughts, placating impulses, regressions and the occasional hard-won step forward. For Robin, this book is about recovering agency, inch by inch. Strike, too, has his reckonings, particularly in his wary rapprochement with his father and his long-delayed declaration of love for Robin. His growth feels linear, almost traditional: a middle-aged man finally laying down pride.
The will-they-won’t-they dance between Strike and Robin remains unresolved, and after eight books some may find their patience frayed. Yet, here the delay feels earned. Robin cannot easily accept Strike’s confession because she has not yet learned to say no: no to undesirable troubled partners, no to misplaced gratitude, no to the ingrained habit of pleasing men at her own expense.
So yes, the book contains more plot strands than some may care to juggle, but to reduce it to questions of pacing or word count is to overlook what makes it vital. Through Robin, The Hallmarked Man becomes more than just a whodunit. It is a meditation on survival: the daily, grinding work of claiming autonomy in a world determined to whittle it away. It is messy, bruising and, at times, melodramatic. It is also Galbraith’s most intimate and uncompromising Strike novel yet.
