Online Trolls

Another epic and thrilling installment in the highly acclaimed, international bestselling crime mystery featuring Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott. After the personal experience of clashes with transgender activists, JK Rowling recreates the spleen of internet trolls in The Ink Black Heart, her crime-writing alter ego of Robert Galbraith.

Edie Lewell, frantic and dishevelled appears in the office begging to speak to her, private detective Robin Ellacott doesn’t know what to make of the situation. The co-creator of the popular cartoon, The Ink Black Heart, Edie is being persecuted by a mysterious online figure who goes by the pseudonym of Anomie, a former fan who designed a free game based on a fictional game in the cartoon, which doubl3es as an anonymous platform for line messaging. Edie is desperate to uncover anomie’s true identity.

Robin Ellacott decides that the agency can’t help with this – and thinks nothing more of it until a few days later when she reads the shocking news that Edie has been tasered and then murdered in Highgate Cemetery, the location of The Ink Black Heart. Robin and her business partner Cormoran Strike, the war veteran private eye, become drawn into the quest to uncover Anomie’s true identity after she criticised the latter’s internet game. But with a complex web of online aliases, business interests and family conflicts to navigate, Strike and Robin find themselves embroiled in a case that stretches their powers of deduction to the limits and which threatens them in new and horrifying ways. 

The motivating force is a response to the clandestine world of those seeking to cancel their targets ( the murdered woman is the creator of the eponymous cartoon “ The Ink Black Heart”. The novel is a synthesis of modern and traditional elements displaying panache.

Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for JK Rowling the author of the Harry Potter series and The Causal Vacancy.

The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith Sphere £25, 1012 pages.