Literature / The Running Grave

The Running Grave is a 2023 novel by J. K. Rowling, written under her Moustache de Plume, Robert Galbraith. It is the seventh book in her series about one-legged private detective Cormoran Strike.

The story is set in 2016. Strike and his partner, Robin Ellacott, are approached by one Sir Colin Edensor. Sir Colin's son, Will, has become ensnared in the grip of a suspicious cult, the Universal Humanitarian Church. Will, who worships cult leader Jonathan "Papa J" Wace, refuses to see his parents and eventually cut off contact with them. He did not even respond when his mother fell ill and died of cancer.

Some inquiries by Cormoran and Robin tend to confirm that the UHC is the worst sort of fake religion, one that dehumanizes and victimizes its adherents for the benefit of cult leaders. But Cormoran and Robin realize that they'll need hard evidence in order to take down the UHC and rescue Will Edensor. Robin insists that she must go undercover and infiltrate the cult. She succeeds in getting inside "Chapman Farm", the church's home base, in the guise of a new convert. Robin then undergoes a terrifying, nightmarish ordeal. While Robin is inside the cult, Cormoran begins to investigate the mysterious, Never Found the Body death-by-drowning of Jonathan Wace's 7-year-old daughter, Daiyu, in 1995.

Meanwhile, the Will They or Won't They? sexual tension between the partners continues to percolate. Robin is dating a police detective, Ryan Murphy, but still can't shake the feelings she has for Cormoran. Cormoran, who has finally admitted to himself that he loves Robin, continues to kick himself for not making a move.

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Tropes:

• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Cormoran never finds out for sure if Charlotte had breast cancer like she claimed or if it was a lie meant to get sympathy out of him.
  • Daiyu Wace's paternity is a question throughout the story. While the official UHC line is that Jonathan Wace is her father, deceased church member Alex Graves believed she was his daughter and willed his money to her accordingly.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: It happens on the very last page of the book, and Cormoran does it in a roundabout way. He is telling Robin about Charlotte's suicide note. He thinks about times in the past when he had a chance to go for it with Robin and didn't. Then he tells Robin that in her note, Charlotte said "—she knew I was in love with you." Robin is still reeling from the shock when Ryan comes by and picks her up from the office, and the book ends.
• The Atoner: Abigail Glover committed a brutal, premeditated, and unjustified murder as a teenager and is now a firefighter, which Strike suspects is her way of dealing with the guilt of her actions, as she also drinks heavily and has nightmares. However, unlike most atoners, she remains willing to lie and kill to keep from being caught.
• Avenging the Villain: When Littlejohn's outed as a mole for Patterson, Strike expects this is about the fierce rivalry between the two PI agencies. That is part of it, but it also turns out Patterson's got a personal motive: as a former Metropolitan Inspector, he's old friends with Inspector Roy Carver (who's been forced into early retirement in the interim since Career of Evil). Patterson blames Strike for Carver's downfall and is determined to avenge him.
• Baby Factory: Acknowledging blood ties and refusing a sexual proposition are anathema at Chapman Farm, with the result that all the women are essentially surrogates, with Mazu claiming motherhood over their children. The ones that get to stick around, anyway—the entire UHC system turns out to be a cover for a massive child trafficking scheme, with the above conditions geared toward creating as many parentless children as possible.
• Bath Suicide: The series-long arc of Strike's relationship with his erratic, unstable ex-girlfriend Charlotte ends in this book, when Charlotte kills herself, slitting her wrists in a bathtub.
• Believing Their Own Lies: Becca Pirbright is noted by Robin to be a particular example of this, as she has basically been persuaded to lie about the circumstances of Daiyu's death and what she actually witnessed Robin doing with children, and yet Robin realizes that Becca still believes she's a good person.
• Beyond Redemption: Strike and Robin's shared opinion of Becca Pirbright by the end of the novel. Despite the exposure of the UHC's lies and crimes, Strike and Robin have little to no faith that Becca can be successfully deprogrammed; the indoctrination runs too deep and has left her Believing Their Own Lies. Indeed, Becca's final TV appearance shows the downfall of the UHC has instead left her even more devoted to their mission and belief system.
• Buxom Beauty Standard: Cormoran finds Bijou Watkins annoying and unpleasant, but has to admit that she has "an undeniably fabulous figure, small-waisted, long-legged and large-breasted." He later has sex with her against his better judgment and is disappointed to find out that her breasts are fake.
• Call-Back: Whenever Cormoran is remembering his difficult childhood with his mother, rock groupie Leda Strike, he sometimes recalls the worst part of his youth being when Leda took him and his sister Lucy to live in a commune in Norfolk. This awful Norfolk commune is mentioned in all but one of the first six books. It turns out that Chapman Farm is located at the same location as the former "Aylemerton Community" where Cormoran briefly lived. Not only that, the UHC is something of a successor to the Aylmerton Community, as Jonathan Wace's wife Mazu was the daughter of one of the Aylemerton cult leaders.
• Calling Parents by Their Name: In the rare letters that Will writes his parents from Chapman Farm, he addresses them as "Colin and Sally." It is later revealed that everyone in the cult does this, referring to family members by names and never using family words like "father" or "mother". This is a tool the UHC uses to undermine and destroy the family ties of its members, so that they are only loyal to the church.
• Chekhov's Gun: The straw dummies that the cult makes for religious ceremonies. It turns out that the people who killed Daiyu Wace used such a dummy, dressed up in Daiyu's clothes, to mislead everyone about the time and manner in which Daiyu died.
• Chekhov's Skill: Cherie Gittins, the woman present at the death of Daiyu Wace, is noted as a strong swimmer, which is why she was chosen for this part of the plan to fake Daiyu's death by drowning, as she had to be capable of swimming far enough out to disperse the straw doll made to "impersonate" Daiyu so that nobody would realise the truth.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: Abigail actually disarms a smoke detector in the fire station so she can smoke, while Cormoran is asking tough questions about what happened around the time of Daiyu's death.
• Continuity Nod: Many references to past events in the series. Kevin Pirbright, a former member of the UHC who escaped, has a book contract with Roper Chard—Roper Chard publishing house was pivotal to the plot of Strike #2, The Silkworm. Sir Colin hired the Strike-Ellacott agency on the recommendation of Izzy Chiswell, who hired them in Strike #4, Lethal White. Charlotte rattles off "Madeline, Ciara, and Elin," the names of some of Cormoran's previous Girls of the Week.
• Creepy Red Herring: Mazu strikes cold horror into everyone who meets her and is guilty of many evil, sadistic and criminal actions—none of which have anything to do with her daughter's death, either the actual murder or the cover story. In fact, she has been genuinely grief-stricken over Daiyu's death for all these years, fully believed that she died in an accidental drowning incident, and is unlikely ever to forgive her husband if she ever admits to herself that he had a pretty good idea what really happened and took steps to protect her murderer.
• Cry into Chest: Lucy is "sobbing into her brother's chest" after he tells her that he's investigating a new cult that occupies the site of the old Aylmerton Community where they briefly lived. He finds out that it was even worse than he knew: Lucy was sexually abused there.
• Cult: The Universal Humanitarian Church pretty much plays the standard cult playbook. Members are deprived of food and sleep and subjected to backbreaking physical labor, to destroy their will to resist. Victims of the cult are cut off from their families and encouraged to give all their money and property to the church. Misbehavior is published with sadistic torture. The church has a free love philosophy which is really an excuse for cult leader "Papa J" to have a harem of "spirit wives."
• Cult Defector: Several members of the UHC Scam Religion have left the group over the years due to its cruel and unhinged practices, and a few more follow suit during the course of the book, but even those who leave tend to be mentally scarred and/or still believe in enough of the Wace family mysticism to be intimidated into silence. Kevin Pirbright, the most outspoken critic of the Waces among the former cultists, is the first (shown) murder victim of the book.
• Cut Himself Shaving: Robin pulls Will Edensor aside for questioning by pretending she wants to "spirit bond" (i.e., have sex) with him. When Will finds out she doesn't want sex he punches her in the face. Robin has to pretend her injury came from a fall.
• Daddy's Girl: Despite being well aware of his evil deeds, Abigail never stopped loving Jonathan Wace, insisting that he truly loved her mother and played no role in her death, and that, while always flawed, he didn't start to actually go bad until he met the cult. Whether the feeling was mutual is hard to tell: he spoiled her early on and covered up her murder of Daiyu Wace, but had other reasons and brutally punished her for it.
• Driven to Suicide: Carrie Curtis Woods hangs herself within hours of Strike and Robin coming by to question her about Daiyu Wace's death. It turns out that she was part of a conspiracy to commit murder.
• Exact Words: Littlejohn's sacking after Patterson's arrested. When he angrily protests that Strike promised he'd keep him on, Strike reminds Littlejohn that wasn't what he actually said. What Strike said was that he'd think about keeping Littlejohn on...and after thinking it over, Strike's still moving forward with his termination.
• Family Theme Naming: In a very dark way. Mazu Wace, who claims to be half-Chinese, gives all of her children Chinese names, some drawn from the I Ching. This extends to several members of the UHC who aren't related to her, as she is considered the "mother" of the cult and is given the right to name every child born at Chapman Farm.
• Fed to Pigs: Daiyu Wace's real fate. Not lost forever when she drowned in the North Sea but murdered on the farm and fed to pigs to dispose of the body.
• Foreign Culture Fetish: Mazu Wace has this for China. She claims to be half-Chinese, is obsessed with the I Ching, names all the children Chinese names, etc. And while Mazu claims motherhood over all the children in the UHC, she gives special attention to one Chinese baby born late into the novel.
• Frame-Up: After Robin escapes Chapman Farm, the UHC fabricates allegations of "child abuse" to preemptively discredit her testimony and findings from her undercover mission.
• Funetik Aksent: Heavily used throughout the book. Abigail, who speaks with a Cockney accent, says "anyfing" and "fort" for "thought."
• The Gambling Addict: Littlejohn's motive for becoming Patterson's mole. He's racked up a serious gambling debt and needs the money.
• Head-Turning Beauty: "Heads were turning" as Strike's ex-girlfriend Charlotte enters a pub. Cormoran can't help but admire Charlotte's phenomenal beauty, even as he's reminded again of her erratic and self-destructive personality.
• Human Trafficking: Just one of the UHC's crimes. "Superfluous babies," of which there are many since women aren't allowed to say "no" and any kind of birth control is forbidden, are sold to the black market adoption racket.
• I Know You Know I Know: Strike declares his intention to Robin to attend a "Superservice" hosted by Jonathan Wace ("Papa J") of the UHC. Robin is aghast, feeling it'd be crazy for Strike to go anywhere near him. Strike tells her that "They know we're investigating, they know we know, they know we know they know. It's time to stop playing this dumb game and actually look Wace in the eye."
• Improbably Predictable: At the end of the novel, Strike meets with Amelia, the sister of his former girlfriend Charlotte, who committed suicide earlier in the novel. Amelia reveals that Charlotte left behind a lengthy suicide note. She admits to having burned it in anger, but tells him that she still remembers the essentials. She offers to share the portion relevant to him, but he tells her he can guess essentially what it said and proceeds to do so. She admits that he basically nailed it.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Robin and Cormoran go to a bar, where she demands a drink before telling him how she was dragged to the police station and accused of child molestation (the UHC cooked the story up to discredit her).
• I Never Got Any Letters: The Ednesor family are upset that Will never answers their letters asking him to visit his dying mother one last time. Robin eventually learns that the cult withheld those letters (albeit after tricking Will into giving them technical legal permission to do so). Will thinks his mother is still alive and healthy.
• The Infiltration: Robin worms her way into Chapman Farm as a new convert to the UHC. It becomes a terrifying ordeal that nearly costs her her sanity.
• Jump Scare: They can happen in books! Strike stumbles across some extremely creepy, disturbing drawings of Daiyu the "Drowned Prophet" on Pinterest. As he's scrolling through all the drawings of corpses and eyeless children, "A loud bang made Strike start." A bird hit his window.
• Killed Off for Real: A variation with the Patterson Agency. Having been a thorn in Strike and Robin's sides since Lethal White, their rival agency implodes after Patterson's grudges and actions end up putting them in catastrophic legal peril.
• Kneel Before Zod: Mazu, who really likes to humiliate people, forces Robin to kiss her feet after Robin misbehaves.
• Lady Macbeth: Mazu Wace, wife to Papa J, an evil sadist that everyone in the compound is frightened of, even as they worship her husband. As Strike himself discovers, while Jonathan Wace was "a charismatic, amoral chancer" before the marriage, it took Mazu to build him up into a cult leader.
• Loony Fan: One of the subplots involves the Strike-Ellacott agency being hired by an actress who is seeking protection from a stalker. They eventually set up a sting and catch the stalkers—it turns out that it was two brothers, working together—in the act of trying to kidnap the actress.
• Meaningful Rename: Mazu names all babies born at Chapman Farm due to her assumed motherhood over the church, including Will and Lin's daughter Qing (as well as, years earlier, Lin herself). After they escape the cult, Will and Lin change Qing's name to Sally, the name of Will's mother who died during his time at Chapman Farm, a fact the cult kept hidden from him.
• The Mole: Clive Littlejohn, one of the subcontractors at the agency, turns out to be a mole sent by rival private detective Mitch Patterson to wreck Strike's business.
• Never Found the Body: The body of Daiyu Wace the "Drowned Prophet" was never recovered. Cormoran begins to suspect that it might have been a case of Faking the Dead. Eventually it's revealed that the trope is Played With: Daiyu is dead, but she met her death in a completely different way.
• Not Me This Time: A variation. After Littlejohn's termination, Strike anticipates he'll try to burgle the agency's offices and takes new security precautions. Indeed, there is an attempted break-in not long afterwards...but it's a UHC operative rather than the fired mole.
• Outside-Context Problem: When Wace attempts to threaten Strike into withdrawing his investigation into and allegations against the UHC, Strike counters that he's not the kind of rich weak-willed person Wace is used to dealing with, and is fully prepared to take the church down.
• Perfumigation:
  • Noli Seymour, the scatterbrained actress who spends time with the cult and has been completely hoodwinked, walks past Robin "in a cloud of tuberose." This helps mark her out as shallow and vain.
  • Mazu Wace has poor hygiene and body odor that she unsuccessfully masks with "a heavy incense perfume."
• Precision F-Strike: Strike confronts the creepy church leader in the inner sanctum of his own temple with all of his elders present, and he's not intimidated: "I'm not as humble as you are, Jonathan. I don’t need to ask myself whether I’m up to the job, because I know I’m fucking great at it, so be warned: if you do anything to hurt either my partner or Rosie Fernsby, I will burn your church to the fucking ground."
• Punishment Box: Robin's low point at the Universal Humanitarian Church comes when she is locked up inside a box for eight hours as a punishment. It nearly breaks her.
• Psychic Link: Robin and Cormoran seem to have one. At a particularly low moment after she has been shut up in a Punishment Box, then released and forced to watch over a child that is being starved to death, Robin suddenly knows that Cormoran is outside the perimeter, there to rescue her. ("She suddenly knew — didn't guess, or hope, but knew — that Strike had just arrived.") She makes a run for it, and she's right, as Cormoran is outside the barbed wire and he does rescue her.
• Resigned in Disgrace: A variation. The Patterson mole subplot reveals that the antagonistic Inspector Roy Carver's been forced to take early retirement in the interim since Career of Evil.
• Revisiting the Cold Case: The story eventually turns into this. The whole cosmology of the Universal Humanitarian Church revolves around the death of Jonathan Wace's daughter Daiyu, who drowned while swimming in 1995. Daiyu became the "Drowned Prophet" and is worshiped by the faithful as a divinity. Cormoran and Robin realize that they must figure out what really happened to Daiyu Wace.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: After being exposed as a mole and providing damning intel on Patterson (intel which ultimately helps bring Patterson down), Strike "rewards" Littlejohn by unceremoniously firing him and denying him his back pay. Strike's not foolish enough to keep an untrustworthy individual like Littlejohn in his agency (nor is he surprised that Littlejohn was delusional enough to not see this coming after all the damage he did).
• Scam Religion: The Universal Humanitarian Church. It's a standard-issue scam cult, in which the members are beaten and starved into submission, while the cult leaders use the faithful as sex slaves, while also depriving them of all their money and assets, so the leaders can live a life of luxury.
• Scatterbrained Senior: Played for drama. Lucy and Cormoran's Uncle Ted, a father figure to them when they were children, is sliding into dementia. They eventually are forced to commit Ted to a memory care facility.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Following Patterson's downfall, Strike ends up receiving job inquiries from several Patterson employees who're desperately trying to jump ship from the imploding agency. A pragmatic Strike is willing to consider job interviews if Shah (as an ex-Patterson employee) vouches for any of his former co-workers' skills and experience.
• Second-Face Smoke: Abigail Glover does this to Strike, but it doesn't really work, as Strike just enjoys the smoke. (He has forced himself to quit cigarettes for vaping.)
• Sexy Soaked Shirt:
  • Used for Fan Disservice. Robin has just been given a baptism into the cult that involves full dunking in a pool. She is uncomfortable about "how translucent her pants had become", especially because gross, creepy Taio Wace is staring at her.
  • This plays out the same way later, when Robin nearly drowns in the pool, only to be pulled out and mercilessly interrogated by Jonathan and Wazu. ("She was shivering, very aware of the wet robe's transparency.")
• Shipper on Deck: Cormoran's old friend Ilsa continues to be this for Cormoran and Robin. Ilsa points out that Robin's new boyfriend Ryan seems to want kids, and points out that Cormoran never has—Ilsa knows that Robin doesn't really want kids either as she's dedicated to her work. Robin knows that Ilsa is shipping her and Cormoran and it continues to make her uncomfortable.
• Spiteful Spit: Marion, a middle-aged woman with a case of unrequited lust for Papa J, spits on Robin after becoming convinced that Robin is Papa J's new "spirit wife."
• Spotting the Thread: Strike realises that two different parties are basically stalking the agency at this point because some of the people following him and Robin are more skilled than others, particularly when some of the stalkers actually shoot at him and Robin.
• Stiff Upper Lip: Mrs. Graves bursts into tears when talking about her son Alex, who hanged himself after the Graveses hired detectives to forcibly kidnap him away from the cult. When he sees this happen, "Colonel Graves assumed the stolid, wooden expression of the average upper-class Englishman when confronted with a show of open emotion."
• Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: How Daiyu Wace aka the "Drowned Prophet" manifests herself when she appears as a ghostly spirit at cult rituals, "soaking wet in her white dress, with long black hair." (It's all a trick, of course.)
• Tattooed Crook: When Strike goes to a prison to visit Jordan Reaney, a former UHC member who's now serving time, Strike finds him heavily tattooed. It turns out that one of those tattoos was deliberately made to cover up a different, more incriminating tattoo.
• Terse Talker: Clive Littlejohn, one of the subcontractors who does leg work, speaks so infrequently that the other operatives in the agency are unnerved by his silence.
  "It's like he gets taxed per syllable," said Robin quietly.
• There Is Only One Bed: Robin and Cormoran wind up sharing a bed in his hotel room after he rescues her from the cult. Unlike many instances of this trope, there is no sex, and no chance of sex as Robin is traumatized and damaged after 16 weeks of torture and suffering. Instead it's played as a deeply emotional moment as they connect.
• Title Drop: When his daughter Daiyu drowned, Jonathan Wace put out an obituary in which he quotes a poem with the line "Came up that cold sea at Cromer like a running grave." Cormoran is repulsed by how Wace plagiarized a poem for his own daughter's obituary.
• Traumatic Haircut: One of the punishment the UHC deploys for misbehavior is forcing church members to shave their heads. Sometimes, members are forced to keep their heads shaved. Robin narrowly avoids this.
• Twitchy Eye: Jiang Wace, Jonathan Wace's younger son, has an eye that sometimes "twitches uncontrollably." It seems to be a symptom of his status as basically The Unfavorite, being stuck with less fun work as a slave driver on Chapman Farm, while his older brother Taio gets to have his pick of women in the compound for sex.
• The Vietnam Vet: Posthumous Character Rust Andersen (an early Chapman Farms resident) was a Vietnam veteran who never returned to America, looks prematurely aged in a picture Robin sees, and spent decades living in a tent and avoiding crowds. He still comes across as having been more benevolent and grounded than most of his neighbors, both before and after the Wace’s takeover of the farm).
• Victoria's Secret Compartment: Robin hides things in the commune in her bra because she has literally nowhere else to hide them. She hides the pebbles that she uses to keep track of the passage of days. When she finds some disturbing Polaroid photos of cult members, she hides the photos in her bra for a week until she can pass them to Cormoran via the dead drop.
• Waif Prophet: The cosmology of the UHC revolves around the "Drowned Prophet", Daiyu Wace. Drowned in the ocean at the age of seven, Daiyu visits the cult from the other world, making prophecies and spiritual pronouncements. It is all a hoax.