Cut above, cut below

Having been a reader all my life, I like to think I get why JK Rowling is a cut above. It took me some time to appreciate Harry Potter before I too became a fan like everyone else on the planet, but then she went and did The Casual Vacancy and then the Cormoran Strike series and it is now clearer than ever that she is in a class we have had to invent. She isn't a descriptive genius, or the wit at the party but if she is in a room with you, beware, because this woman understands people. Good and evil, betrayal and pettiness, the limits of love, it comes together best in CB Strike, the name for the TV series based on the books. Alas, while the books are pretty near perfect, the TV adaptation, clever, subtle and often brilliantly directed as it may be, lacks a certain something.
Tom Burke is excellent as Cormoran, shaggy, weirdly handsome, paradoxical, as nuanced as Holliday Grainger who plays sidekick and braveheart Robin Ellacott. Their chemistry translates well on screen etc etc but.
If Burke is in a scene with Killian Scott as DI Wardle, it's Scott who has your attention (woefully miscast as he is, Killian should have been the killer). This is the kiss of death for an actor, when your X Factor only hits W.
Let me put it this way, if you watched Ghost in the Shell there is only one actor you notice immediately, waiting for him to return, and that's Pilou Asbaek (you will remember him in Game of Thrones as the extremely untrustworthy (but then who isn't in GoT) Euron Greyjoy). Asbaek has charisma up the wazoo, especially when set against Scarlett Johansson whose bewildering Hunchback of Notre Dame shuffle is only offset by her unfortunate footwear (oh, Rupert Sanders, you lost more than your moral compass in recent years, didn't you?) in failing to hold the viewer's interest. Charlize Theron in Aeon Flux already had the character and look nailed for this role.
But I digress.
I wait with bated breath to watch all episodes of CB Strike, yet since I missed my calling as casting director,
I wait without fully committing. Story of my life, come to think of it.

What just happened

You can't help but fangirl JK Rowling for her tenacity, her talent and fighting the crass and the crazed (see her Twitter), but this morning I mumbled Oh Joanne, Joanne and did the whole SMH thing. I had reached the last page of Career of Evil, you see, waiting for the sexual tension to be cut by a knife, with the same precision rendered to the limb that arrived on a secretary's desk and started the novel off. I waited. And I waited. And in the last line of the last page I realised that either Rowling has reached that stage of fame where editors are afraid to touch her, or she has lost her touch. It was all wrong.
The relationship between Detective Cormoran Strike and his partner, (we won't demean her by saying his Girl Friday), Robin Ellacott is one of the best things about Rowling's crime series, possibly better than her denouements and her sometimes too-populated pages, (I sometimes had to backread to keep track of who was who and what heinous crime each had committed), which nevertheless make for fun times. Characters like Shanker is a case in point, and no it isn't pronounced the Indian way, who reminds me of the wonderful Bubba in Dennis Lehane's Kensie and Gennaro books; how I would love to have one of them come charging over the hill to my rescue, no questions asked. Am I the only one with a Bodyguard on my wishlist?
But the genius subtleties between Cormoran and Robin, that's the thing. So to have it fended off time after time and then end on the worst possible note was aggravating and bewildering.
Do we finally look at the hitherto willow-in-a-typhoon Cormoran as broken in a battle between his head and his heart (i.e., the wuss of all wusses, make up your mind, for god's sake, Corm), and Robin as the kind of weak-willed character she herself despises, when they have been our heroes for 62 Chapters? Wtf.
Cormoran is sexy, imperfect and adorable; Robin is gorgeous, feisty and uncaring of gender when it comes to getting down and dirty in a fight, literally. But her last words show her to be indifferent to vows that are not to be taken lightly, in a setting where real love, which she has already found (and the way Rowling shows that without ever saying it is brilliant), should triumph. Well, I'm just lost.
Will I buy Book 4, Lethal White? Sigh. Of course.