The fifth Cormoran Strike novel opens with a cold case forty years old: GP Margot Bamborough disappeared in 1974, and despite a trial, no body was ever found and no conviction secured. Her daughter Anna, now middle-aged, hires Strike and Robin Ellacott to investigate — hoping for resolution that the police, four decades on, can no longer provide.
The investigation takes Strike and Robin deep into the 1970s, interviewing elderly witnesses, tracing long-dispersed evidence, and building a picture of a world — the medical and social landscape of mid-seventies London — that feels simultaneously distant and uncomfortably recognisable. The prime suspect, Dennis Creed, is a convicted serial killer already serving life in prison; the question is whether Margot was his victim, or whether someone else has been hiding in Creed's shadow for forty years.
At over 900 pages, Troubled Blood is the longest Cormoran Strike novel and one of the most structurally ambitious, conducting a real procedural cold case investigation with the rigour of historical fiction while simultaneously advancing Strike's and Robin's personal stories toward a long-anticipated development. Published in September 2020, the book won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel of the Year.