There was one final confrontation between Rafe and Robin, who was suckered in going to meet him on a houseboat. Stop me if this is getting too ridiculous. This, of course, had tormented Billy for the rest of his life. One of the people who had mistaken his gender was poor Billy Knight, who saw what he thought was a girl burying the bones of Kinvara’s favourite horse – bones that he thought were human bones. His psychopathic tendencies began when he was a child, when he had long hair and was mistaken for a girl. In an eye-widenening explanation, slimy old Rafe Chiswell was revealed to have been having an affair with his step-mother, all because he wanted an expensive painting that no one else in the family knew was expensive. Then there were horses (horses?), paintings of horses (say what now?), and the bones of horses (okaaaaay then). Apparently, the Chiswells and the Knights built gallows to sell to dodgy regimes (hence the secret Marappe file, which featured a Zimbabwean man). Just before it did, Kinvara explained the whole Chiswell-Knight relationship. From the moment Cormoran and Robin interviewed her, things descended into a frantic, barely conceivable ending. Winn had gone from blustering MP to drinking super-strength lager on a park bench in the space of an episode (a pretty dramatic transformation, it has to be said), but Strike called it right: Winn needed Chiswell alive to inflict as much pain and vengeance upon him as possible.Īll eyes were back on the dysfunctional Chiswell family, and especially his widow Kinvara. For good reason, too – the late Freddie Chiswell, the apple of his father’s eye – did unspeakable things to Winn’s daughter, causing her to take her own life. Then it was on to Geraint Winn, Chiswell’s rival MP and the man who had been blackmailing him. Tools? Have you ever heard anyone murder someone for some tools? And in a crime drama? Jimmy Knight was a no-no because, in custody, the wildly arrogant activist said that the Chiswells owed his family money after Jasper sold his father’s tools.

There were paintings, there were boys that looked like girls and there was poor old Robin, who was thrust into yet another life or death situation.īut before the confounding denouement, like in any good procedural there were suspects to be processed. In the end, it came down to… I’m still not entirely sure, such was the furious onslaught of odd twists and turns. After holding out hope that this final part of the latest four-part Strike story would provide something approaching a satisfying ending, I was let down horribly.

Lethal white cormoran strike 4