Lethal White by Robert Galbraith

This is the fourth book in the Cormoran Strike crime fiction series. It has an absorbing plot, believable characters, and well-written dialogue. For purely personal reasons I liked the setting - southern England  – and the author’s descriptions of London neighborhoods, a topic near and dear to my heart. The action moves along nicely, and the relationship between the principal characters - Strike and his employee Robin Ellacott - is  tense, deep and skillfully drawn. 

My one complaint is that I had difficulty keeping track of the secondary characters and how they're related to the plot, and to each other. There are so many of them. I often wanted to back up and refresh my memory. That would have been easy to do when reading on Kindle - just use the search for the character's name, and up pops a list of every time he/she is mentioned. But you can't do that with a hard copy edition, which is what I had in hand. I found myself wishing that Rowling would give us a list of characters right at the beginning, like Shakespeare did. I tried to scribble my own dramatis personae on my bookmark, together with the page number where they first appear. The list for the first 100 pages was 17 characters long. After that, I just gave up and went with the flow. It was well worth the effort.

N.B.  I read the second and third books in the series (The Silkworm and Career of Evil) 10 years ago. As to when I read the first, that is lost in the mists of time. I read most of the Harry Potter books as well. Rowling, aka Robert Galbraith, is a remarkable talent.

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Witch Wood by John Buchan

"Witch Wood," one of three novels contained in this volume, takes place in Scotland during the Anglo-Scottish War of 1650-1652. For those who aren't familiar with that war (I wasn't), there's a good summary in Wikipedia.

Plot summary: David Sempill is a newly ordained minister assigned to the isolated Scottish Border village of Woodilee. He discovers that his congregation includes a group who secretly conduct pagan rituals in a nearby forest, the Black Wood of Melanudrigill (thus, the book's title). The minister views this as witchcraft, devil worship and blasphemy, and vows to it stamp out. He finds few allies but embarks on his mission regardless. At same time, he is torn between his belief in God on one hand, and the rigid dogma of the Scottish Presbyterian church on the other. The church is more of an obstruction than anything, and he receives little or no support from church officials - quite the opposite, in fact. He frequently asks himself if he would be better suited to the life of a soldier.

This book was a very satisfying read. Characters are believable and well developed. Buchan's presentation of the gut-wrenching conflicts the minister faces give us empathy for the character. I found the historical background interesting, leaving me wanting to know more about what are known as The Wars of the Three Kingdoms. 

The plot proceeds at a leisurely pace, as books from this era do, with much more narration than dialogue. There's a nice love story subplot involving the minister and Katrine Yester, who personifies the benign side of nature and has no fear of the Black Forest. Some of the locals believe she is "the queen of the fairies." I also enjoyed the pastoral scenes, with fine descriptions of the landscape of the borderlands. It must have been a beautiful but harsh place to live in. 

I began with the Audible audiobook version. But in the spoken format, it was sometimes hard to understand the Scots dialect of some characters.  For example, Mark Kerr (one of the more interesting characters) remarks: "'The Kirk has made the yett of grace ower wide for sinful men, and all ither yetts ower narrow." Yett is Scottish for gate. Kerr is commenting on the Presbyterian concept of predestination: the elect have already been chosen by God for eternal life even if they sin, whereas everyone else can never enter Heaven no matter how virtuous they are.

Despite the dialect, I kept listening. The plot and the historical content intrigued me. About two-thirds of the way through I started reading it in book form (Kindle, actually), thinking that reading words rather than hearing them would make things more transparent. Indeed that was the case and I read hell-bent-for-leather until the end. Now I'm re-reading my favorite parts on the Kindle. That's how gripping the story was. 

Further Reading:

Lin, Hsin-Ying. "That puts it not unto the Touch, To win or lose it all: The Moral Metaphor of Witchcraft in John Buchan's Witch Wood". Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture. 8 (2): 5. June 2015.

McCleary, Alastair: "John Buchan and the Path of the Keen." English Literature in Translation, 1880-1920. Vol 29:3. 1986.