The Ink Black Heart (A Cormoran Strike Novel, 6)

I’ve looked forward to this book for a very long time and downloaded the kindle edition as soon as it became available. Reading it on kindle is proving to be very hard work. There are lengthy in-game chats between some characters which are in a barely legible font which can’t be changed. Gave up on my paper white, struggling along on a fire 8 by expanding the pages. Not acceptable at all

I was so excited to get Robert Galbraith's latest Cornoran Strike book. I am 5% into it, but the book is unreadable on my Kindle Paperwhite. There are pages and pages of texts which I presume are photographed rather than written as part of the text. They are tiny. I can't cope. I am a Kindle reader because arthritis means that I can't hold a hardback book or a paperback comfortably or easily - and this is a big book at 1200 pages. Please, please, please provide a fully text based version.

Robert Galbraith is one of Britain's foremost novelists. The Ink Black Heart is fine example of great writing. To willingly invest the many hours in it's reading is proof of that. Bigotted avtivists will hopefully be encouraged to sling their hooks and not bother to maliciously post poor reviews. All power to the author, shs is a bloody marvel.

First and foremost the book is brilliant. I am thoroughly enjoying it and it’s wonderful to be back in the company of Robin and Strike. My issue is that these reviews are surely meant to be about the quality of the text written not an opportunity to point out errors with formatting on a kindle? I think this needs to be looked into as it can be deceiving to a prospective buyer and unfair to the author.

One of my first considerations when I rate a book is how I felt on finishing. If, when I finish, I sigh with the relief of a tedious job finished, that book is probably not going to get a rating above three stars. If I wish that the book could have gone on longer and look forward to the next installment, then that is likely to be a four or five-star book. Now, The Ink Black Heart is a long book -- the kindle edition is listed as 1272 pages. But it didn't feel long. I was turning pages as eagerly at the end as at the beginning, and I look forward to seeing what happens to Cormoran and Robin in installment seven. J.K. Rowling knows how to tell a story. Ink Black Heart has two plots. The first, which is actually the central plot of the Cormoran Strike series, concerns the relationship between Strike and his business partner Robin Ellacott. The second is the murder mystery. At the end of the previous book Troubled Blood, Strike and Robin recognized that they had become each other's best friends. Because we are inside their heads, we know that each of them has occasionally experienced more romantic feelings, but these have not been acknowledged. The central question of the Strike/Robin relationship, then, is "Is it better to be friends, or lovers?" For me personally this is one of the most interesting and attractive aspects of the books. We Who Read are awash in romance novels in which "falling in love" is taken to be the highest possible point of any interpersonal relationship. In most fiction, friendship between a man and a woman (substitute genders as appropriate for non-cishet characters) appears only as a way-station on the path towards full-on romance. The mystery plot takes place largely on the Internet. Here I have a bit of advice to readers: There are a lot of characters, and keeping track of them is not always easy. Make yourself a crib sheet listing the user IDs of players in Drek's Game, their real names, and their twitter handles. You will only gradually learn these, but by the end of the book you have been told who most of the Game-players are. I wish someone had given me this advice -- it would have made the story easier to follow. If you're a devotee of mystery novels, you may not like this one much. There are a lot of rules that mystery novels are supposed to follow, and by those criteria Ink Black Heart would be disappointing. I personally didn't mind, because I read a mystery the way I read any other novel -- as a story with characters and plot. The main thing I didn't like about the murder mystery is that Robin and Strike are not very clever. Most of their difficulties have to do with not understanding the Internet as well as they ought to, and their discoveries often come down simply to learning about common Internet tricks. Still, if you are or can put yourself into the necessary mindset of Intern...