YMMV / The Running Grave

• Complete Monster: Jonathan Wace, Becca Pirbright, Dr Zhou and Taio Wace are cruel and love to lord their power over others, but Mazu Wace actually enjoys watching others suffer and stealing children from mothers, some teenagers, to raise as her own, before getting bored with them.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The subplot of Mitch Patterson trying to undermine Strike has hints that the rival agency might have turned traitor and is working for the church after losing the client to Strike. This is revealed to be a Red Herring and the subplot is wrapped up swiftly after Robin gets out of the farm, but Patterson working for the church could have had some interesting repercussions for the case, especially with everything Littlejohn was privy to before Strike started shutting him out, and would have shown just how cautious the church was, adding a sense of danger.
• The Woobie: A large percentage of the people associated with the UHC Scam Religion (even the Jerkass Woobies) are horribly victimized and it says something that they are actually getting off comparatively lightly if they are just being subjected to regular Gaslighting, menial labor punishments for showing independence or attachment to loved ones, public shaming, and forced sexual intercourse regardless of their ages and sexual orientations. Some have suffered slow deaths due to being denied medical attention, suffered brain damage from torture after failing important tasks, been subjected to extremely harsh and public Malicious Slander, been driven to try to kill themselves (sometimes successfully), or forced to participate in crimes which have left them with severe trauma decades later. Paul Draper, Flora Brewster, Emily and Kevin Pirbright, Deirdre Doherty and her children (especially Maeve), and Brian and Sheila Kinison are among the bigger sufferers, but Louise Pirbright might surpass them all. She ends the book on suicide watch with both of her sons dead, both of her daughters estranged from her (for drastically different reasons), and the knowledge that her family spent decades going through all of that based on the lies of a con man. The cult also forces her to shave her head for a year and desecrate the grave of her Cult Defector older son (whom she previously tried to honor by planting flowers on his grave) as part of their power trips. Near the end of the book, Strike reflects on how even the exposure of the dark truth about the cult has left its now-enlightened surviving members “broken in an unfamiliar landscape[.]”