Lethal White is the fourth title in the Cormoran Strike Novels by J. K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith.
A year has passed since Cormoran Strike's partner Robin Ellacott got married to her fiancé Matthew Cunliffe; their marriage remains strained. Strike has a new girlfriend, a bubbly shop-owner named Lorelei.Meanwhile, Strike's detective agency has thrived enough that they have been able to hire a couple more operatives.
The story gets rolling when a mentally disturbed young man named Billy barges into Strike's office, telling a tale - "I see a kid killed...He strangled it, up by the horse." Billy darts out of the office immediately after telling this strange story, and Strike finds himself compelled to track Billy down. He manages to find Billy's brother, Jimmy Knight, a radical left-wing activist. This draws the attention of none other than Jasper Chiswell, an aristocrat and member of the British Cabinet. Chiswell hires Strike, tells Strike that Jimmy Knight and others are blackmailing him, and tasks Strike with digging up dirt on Knight and the other blackmailers. This Strike does, while continuing to look for the missing Billy Knight.
Then there's a murder, and events take a turn.
This book contains examples of:
- Affair Hair: It's not a hair, it's an earring, found by Robin on her bedroom floor after being shaken from the sheets of her marital bed. This is how she finds out that her husband Matthew is cheating on her with his old lover Sarah Shadlock. She doesn't realize until much later that later that Sarah almost certainly left it deliberately, just to goad Matthew into getting divorced already.
- Affectionate Nickname: The propensity of the British aristocracy in general and the Chiswell family in particular towards using ridiculous nicknames for each other is a source of mockery in the novel, as every member of the family has one: Isabella is 'Izzy', while her older sister Sophia is 'Fizzy', and Sophia's three children are called 'Pringle', 'Flopsy' and 'Pong' and her husband Torquil is called 'Torks'. Less affectionate is their calling Kinvara 'Tinky the Second' behind their back as a reference to their grandfather's much younger trophy wife who they derisively called 'Tinky'. There's also "the Orca," which is the name given to Raphael's mother Ornella because she dresses in black and white. Upon hearing the names, Strike comments on how ridiculous they sound.Strike: Jesus Christ. It’s like interviewing the Teletubbies.
- Alcohol Hic: Sarah's fiancé Tom, who is eventually revealed to be a pretty unhappy guy, is hiccuping as he drinks at Robin's wedding.
- Animal Motifs: The book's title refers to a fatal birth defect that can affect horses
, and horses occur throughout the plot (live ones, paintings of them, and the Uffington White Horse).- There's also recurring references to swans, either appearing or referred to, whenever Matthew and Robin are together or their relationship is discussed. This is almost certainly used as Irony, as swans mate for life and Robin leaves Matthew for good by the end of the novel.
- Asshole Victim: Both in the main story and in the backstory:
- Freddie Chiswell, whose death in combat during the Iraq War Strike investigated, was such a despicable human being that everyone Strike interviewed immediately asked if he was shot by his own troops. We learn that he once murdered a family horse and he thought it was funny to spike a small child's yogurt with drugs.
- Jasper Chiswell is such a rude, entitled prick that only his family really cares about the death.
- A non-fatal example with Matthew Cunliffe, who thoroughly deserves the Humiliation Conga he suffers over the course of the book, given his cruel, jealous, and selfish actions.
- The Baby Trap: Raphael is the result of an attempt at this by his mother, thinking that Jasper Chiswell would marry her. He didn't. Though its subverted as there is no indication that she lied or sabotaged any attempt at birth control.
- Blind People Wear Sunglasses: Della Winn has a good reason for wearing hers, namely, a rare birth defect that caused her to be born without any eyes at all. Strike finds the glasses "inscrutable" and "ominous", even though he likes Della personally.
- Book Ends: The first sentence of the novel has the wedding photographer fussing about the swans in the lake as he's photographing Mr. and Mrs. Cunliffe—one is diving for food while the other sits out of shot. Once the photos are done and Matthew lets Robin go, the swan out of shot swims over to its mate. The last sentence of the novel has Robin parting from Strike and not noticing an engraving of two swans on the door she passes, the symbolism being that Robin and Cormoran are the true pairing.
- Brits Love Tea: How can you tell Robin and Cormoran are British? She brings him a cup of hot tea as he's sitting vigil by the bedside of his nephew Jack, who has been hospitalized with a ruptured appendix.
- The Bus Came Back: Charlotte makes an appearance in the flesh for the first time since the opening chapters of The Cuckoo's Calling, trying her old games on Strike, who is having none of it.
- Central Theme: Class distinctions in Britain and the arrogance of the upper classes. A plot point throughout the series as Strike reflects on his ill-starred romance with society girl Charlotte, it really comes to the fore here as he's hired by the haughty Chiswell family. When one of the Chiswells reflects on seeing Billy as a child being beaten by his awful drunk of a father, Cormoran thinks about how none of the Chiswells bothered to call the police about it, because they regard such behavior as natural to the lower classes.
- Chekhov's Skill: Sarah Shadlock works at Christie's and is involved in auctioning off high art. This is revealed in the party scene early in the book where Sarah is being pretentious and pissing Robin off, but it becomes relevant towards the end when Sarah winds up evaluating the portrait of the mare and foal in the Chiswell mansion.
- Cigarette of Anxiety: Strike's "fingers shook slightly as he lit a cigarette" after he arrives just in time to save Robin from being murdered.
- Deuteragonist: Robin Cunliffe (née Ellacott) plays her largest part to date.
- Distant Prologue: After the opening chapter of the book serves as an Immediate Sequel telling what happened following Robin's wedding vows, a time skip of a year takes us to the main plot with Billy's arrival at the office.
- Emasculated Cuckold: Tom, Sarah's husband. Not only is Sarah cheating on him with Matthew, Sarah and Matthew take delight in mocking Tom for his receding hairline and lack of skill at cricket. Tom, not surprisingly, has taken to drinking.
- Entertainingly Wrong: Strike thinks that Robin may be either pregnant or trying to get pregnant. In fact, her marriage is going terribly and she could want nothing less. When Strike finally gets up the nerve to ask her if she's pregnant, it's been a week since she split up with her husband Matthew for cheating on her with Sarah Shadlock, an old-school friend whom he previously had sex with before getting married to Robin. She laughs before revealing this to him.
- Epigraph: Every chapter is headed with a quote from the Henrik Ibsen play Rosmersholm note . In a truly strange piece of Irony, after this book was published, Tom Burke (who plays Strike in the tv show) starred in a revival of this same play!
- A Family Affair: Part of the solution is the reveal that Kinvara is having an affair with her stepson Raphael. (She's a Trophy Wife so they're very close in age.)
- Grail in the Garbage: It turns out that painting of a mare and a white foal, hanging basically ignored in the Chiswell mansion, is an 18th century work of art worth over twenty million pounds.
- Humiliation Conga: Matthew's wedding day is a real nightmare: He gets overshadowed by the now-famous Strike, stood up by his new wife in front of all his friends and family, called out by his in-laws and punched by his brother-in-law. Then he gets very sick during his honeymoon. Then he gets humiliated on the cricket field, prompting a "The Reason You Suck" Speech from his best friend Tom, who mercilessly reveals what his coworkers and teammates really think about him. And finally he gets dumped by Robin after she finds out he's cheating on her with Sarah, again. Still, Matthew has been such a jerkass to everyone that it's really hard to feel sorry for him.
- Immediate Sequel: The story picks up immediately after the dramatic cliffhanger at the end of Career of Evil in which Strike stumbles into Robin's wedding as she's giving her, "I do," and crashes on the floor, causing her to look into his eyes and not those of her new husband. This is the prologue, and the first chapter then begins a year later.
- Impoverished Patrician: Jasper Chiswell is in dire financial trouble due to his late father's extravagant lifestyle and major losses in the stock market due to the 2008 financial crisis. His country estate is in serious disrepair and he has had to sell most of the land.
- I Never Got Any Letters: Matthew's rash decision to block Strike on Robin's phone, which happened near the end of Career of Evil as he and Robin headed north for the wedding, backfires horribly on him. Robin finds out at the wedding reception when Strike tells her he called, and Robin nearly dumps Matthew on the spot.
- Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube!: The trope is discussed when the cause for Rhiannon Winn's suicide comes out. A picture of her in a compromising position was passed around online among the members of the fencing team and drove her to kill herself. This happened during the early days of the internet and before social media, with one character speculating that if it had happened at the time of the novel it might've ended up in YouTube or gone viral.
- Irony: The child who Billy saw "killed" was only rendered unconscious. He grows up to be one of the murderers.
- It Works Better with Bullets: Strike removes the bullets from the killer's gun when he has the opportunity, although it is downplayed as when they hold Robin at gunpoint several days have passed and Strike can't be sure that they haven't discovered the gun is empty and reloaded it, so he reasons that Robin is in just as much danger as she otherwise would have been.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Kinvara of all people was the only member of the Chiswell family to point out that despite being an unpleasant thug and a blackmailer Jimmy Knight was right that he and Billy really were entitled to the £40,000 that were their late father's cut of the sale of the gallows.
- Kavorka Man: Eric Wardle finally wonders out loud, genuinely puzzled, how on Earth someone who looks like Strike keeps getting attractive women fighting over him.Wardle: How d'you do it? Blimey, I'd like to know your—
Strike: There's no secret. Some women just like fat one-legged pube-headed men with broken noses.
Wardle: Well, it's a sad indictment of our mental health services that they're loose on the streets.- Robin herself muses about Strike's remarkable success with women, given his "generally bearlike appearance" as well as the pube hair. Ironic in this instance as Robin herself has a sexual attraction to Strike that she is desperately trying to suppress.
- Land Poor: Jasper was ruined by the 2008 financial collapse. His family isn't exactly living in cardboard boxes or anything, but they're selling off land and possessions. Robin and Cormoran note that the Chiswell mansion is looking distinctly threadbare and ratty.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
- At one point, the narration notes when Matthew's eyes darken that Robin had thought this was literary license until she watched as his eyes turned black as his pupils dilated in shock upon telling him "Well, the problem with that, Matt, is that I don't love you anymore."
- When one of the members of the Chiswell family uses the phrase "Steady on, old chap," it's said that Robin never thought she would hear the phrase outside of a book.
- Mal Mariée: An extreme version of this, as Trophy Wife Kinvara hates her overbearing asshole of a husband so much that she eventually conspires to murder him.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Jasper Chiswell, an aristocratic Conservative politician with a unique and often mocked hairstyle, is a caricature of Alan Clark.
- Of Corsets Sexy: Lorelei wears a corset-and-stockings ensemble when going to bed with Strike.
- One-Steve Limit: A Real Life aversion is mentioned; gentlemen's club Pratt's, which refers to all employees as George "to avoid confusion". When they took on a female employee, they called her Georgina.
- Phantom Limb Pain: Strike, having trouble sleeping after the Chiswell murder, remembers the last time he was plagued by insomnia: when he was in an Army hospital after losing his leg, feeling an itch that he couldn't scratch on his phantom foot.
- Plot-Triggering Death: Billy witnessing the death by strangulation of a child is what starts off the plot of the novel. Seeing the death and burial decades ago and finally telling Strike leads to the plans of several major characters' plans getting derailed. It's actually subverted - Billy saw a strangling and a burial, but the child did not die and actually grows up to be one of the murderers whose very plan was changed by Billy confessing to seeing the incident to Strike - the effect on the plot is the same though.
- Poor Communication Kills: There's a lot of tension between Cormoran and Robin throughout the book, mostly because they're not communicating about important things - even completely leaving out the part where they're in denial about their true feelings for one another - such as Robin's PTSD-triggered anxiety attacks and her subsequent feelings of inadequacy. True to form, once they're forced to confront this late in the book, about eighty to ninety per cent of their issues are cleared up with two short conversations.
- Potty Dance: A woman who was desperate to get into a restroom at a party "danced on the spot in desperation for a few more seconds" before rushing outside, the restroom being occupied. (Robin, who is at the party undercover, gets into the restroom soon after and finds an important bit of evidence hidden inside.)
- Precision F-Strike: Robin is much less foul-mouthed than most other characters in the series — her swearing at Matthew when she finds out that he intercepted her "fucking calls" and later when she tells him to fuck off shows how serious the situation is. Other than at those two points, she only ever swears strongly in-character when she's undercover as Bobbi.
- Pretentious Pronunciation: The name of the Chiswell family is pronounced Chizzle. Over the course of the novel it becomes a shibboleth of sorts as only people already familiar with Jasper Chiswell and his brood pronounce it correctly right of the bat.
- Production Throwback: There is no definite sign in the Cormoran Strike novels that they share a continuity with the Harry Potter series. But in one scene Robin is working undercover at an occult shop, and an old lady customer interested in a ceremonial athame dagger is described as an "elderly witch".
- Rich Boredom: Deconstructed with Charlotte. When she reappears in his life, Cormoran instantly twigs as to why: Charlotte's greatest fear is routine and "ordinary life"; she's spent nearly her entire life deliberately causing as much trouble and conflict as possible for everyone around her in an effort to avoid this. She wants to lure Cormoran into an affair because leaving her husband and babies for her semi-infamous ex will cause exactly the kind of scandal and chaos that she constantly craves.
- Running Gag:
- The farting sofa from The Silkworm reappears.
- The terms used to refer to the color of horses and Strike's confusion over them.
- Ruptured Appendix: Cormoran's nephew Jack's appendix actually does rupture, and it nearly kills him. His parents were away on vacation, and Cormoran, whose POV passages often emphasize how he doesn't really like children, ends up being the one going to the hospital. Even Cormoran is surprised by how upset he is.
- Sexy Soaked Shirt: Robin gets orange juice spilled on her at a pub, which leads to another instance of Cormoran trying to ignore how sexy she is."The thin cotton dress was sticking to her everywhere: Strike kept his gaze resolutely on her eyes."
- Shout-Out:
- As he's wincing in pain from his stump while traipsing around on a case, Strike thinks that, "like the character of Hyman Roth in one of his favorite films, he had chosen this business freely."
- At one point, after they've just seen the Uffington White Horse, Cormoran and Robin get into a discussion about the weird names for colors of horses, like how you don't call a brown horse "brown". Cormoran says "Isn't there a play where white horses appear as a death omen?". That's Rosmersholm, the play where the epigrams of every chapter come from.
- Smoky Gentlemen's Club: Pratt's, the fancy "gentlemen's club" where Strike meets Jasper Chiswell for the first time. A real club that Robin calls "very Tory", where women aren't allowed and all the waiters are called "George".
- Spanner in the Works: Billy Knight visiting Strike sets in motion events that derail two different plans:
- Drawing Strike into the situation gets him hired by Jasper Chiswell and derails the blackmail plans of both Jimmy Knight and Geraint Winn.
- Strike's involvement leads to Jasper being in the vicinity of the gallery at the right time to find out about Raphael's affair with Kinvara, forcing them to accelerate their plan to murder him, which results in several mistakes that get them caught.
- In a more esoteric fashion, the coral that Matthew gets injured on during his and Robin's honeymoon. Robin had pretty much decided to annul her marriage when she and Matthew returned to England, but Matthew's injury and subsequent dangerous fever from infection made Robin decide to give their marriage a shot after all. To her eventual regret.
- Start to Corpse: This novel has the longest one of the series, as the first corpse doesn't turn up until Chapter 35.
- Time Skip: The first chapter picks up with Robin's wedding as seen in the last scene of the previous book. Immediately after that, the story skips ahead one year.
- Title Drop: "Lethal white syndrome" is a diseases of horses in which newborn foals are born colored all white, and more importantly, with a malformed colon which renders them unable to have bowel movements. Afflicted foals appear to be healthy but die within a few days. One of the few remaining pieces of art at the Chiswell mansion is a painting of a mare mourning a foal with lethal white syndrome.
- Trophy Wife: Jasper's wife Kinvara is a smoking hot curvaceous redhead less than half his age. The perils of Trophy Wife-don are deconstructed, however, as their marriage is a train wreck.
- 20 Minutes into the Past: The novel is set in 2012, with a brief mention of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and with the plot resting partly on the Olympics and on a festering charity scandal which appears to be referencing the real-life Kids Together scandal.
- Unwanted Spouse: With great reluctance, Robin married Matthew, but finds absolutely no joy in the marriage. She finally finds it in her to dump him after discovering that he is again cheating on her with Sarah Shadlock.
- Wedding Ring Removal: Robin takes off her wedding ring when going undercover as Venetia Hall in the House of Commons. Her relationship with Matthew is rocky at best and when she forgets to wear the wedding ring on their trip for their first anniversary dinner, he is quick to notice and chastise her for not even bothering to remember to wear it for that.
- Who Murdered the Asshole: The central mystery is the death of Jasper Chiswell, a rude, arrogant, bigoted, sexist asshole that nobody liked.
- Wig, Dress, Accent: Robin makes heavy use of wigs, colored contacts, glasses, makeup, and modifying her accent while speaking to successfully go undercover despite becoming semi-famous as Strike's partner.
- Worthless Yellow Rocks: A painting of a mare and her foal (the foal has died of lethal white syndrome) is dismissed by the Chiswell family as being worth "peanuts" (£5000 to £8000). At the end of the book, it turns out to be probably a lost Stubbs painting worth millions.
- Writing Indentation Clue: A disturbed Billy ripped away the notepad paper where he wrote his address, but Strike is able to get "Charlemont Road" by shading over the paper below with a pencil.
