Troubled Blood by Joanne Rowling. Short summary

5 seconds

The fifth book in the Cormoran Strike series. Private detective Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin Ellacott are looking for a young woman who disappeared years ago and meet a psychopathic killer.

1 minute

Cormoran Strike is a private detective, a former British military police officer who lost his leg in a hot spot. One day the detective is approached by Anna Phipps, who asks him to investigate the disappearance of her mother, Dr. Margo Bamborough, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances almost forty years ago.

Strike and his assistant Robin search for witnesses to those long ago events and interview acquaintances of Margo Bamborough. The chief suspect in the doctor’s disappearance was a homicidal maniac, Dennis Creed, who liked to disguise himself as a woman. Creed had been behind bars for years, but he would not confess to killing Bamboro.

For a whole year, Strike investigates the mysterious case, but never finds traces of the missing woman. In the end, the detective does figure out the real killer. It turned out to be one of the witnesses — nurse Janice Beatty. The woman worked at the same hospital as the missing Margot. It turned out that Janice was a serial murderer-poisoner, who took sadistic pleasure in tormenting her victims.