Today is Memorial Day in the United States. See Memorial Day: Cormoran’s Memories for my 2021 reflections on Strike’s experiences and take-aways from his time in the Army. Thank you to the veterans in our reading audience. Semper Fi!

On to the subject of today’s post —

Ink Black Heart, the sixth installment in Rowling-Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike series, will be published on 30 August 2022, exactly three months from today, just over 91 days at this writing.

In the run-up to publication of new Strike titles, our habit since Lethal White has been to make predictions about the book we are about to receive. There are various methods to this, from “what we’d like to see happen” in the Strike-Ellacott relationship and guesses about the epigraph focus of the novel based on its title to informed guesswork using literary alchemy, septology-series ring composition, and the Parallel Series Idea. It’s a lot of fun, frankly, and our crew has had some notable direct hits (and a lot of failures we don’t celebrate, though we scorecard our predictions openly).

The thing is, it doesn’t happen until the frenetic days, maybe weeks just before the publication date (Louise Freeman’s first predictions post being an outlier in being posted even before we had the Ink Black Heart title). I’m thinking we could try something systematic and regular over the next three months.

Here’s one idea as an example: we could divide the five books into the ~90 days we have left by assigning June to a review of Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm, July to Career of Evil and Lethal White, and all of August to the massive Troubled Blood, with a week just before publication devoted to predictions, sure and certain or off-the-wall. Maybe a vote on events or revelations that seem more likely than not to happen in Strike6, as in the StrikeFans ‘Ink Black Heart Checklist’ posted last December.

Let me know your ideas and your thoughts about focusing posts in the next three months on a review of the five books already in hand. I’m getting more excited about the new book now that we’re within a trimester of its birthing!

The Parallel Series Idea or PSI is the theory that Rowling-Galbraith is writing her Cormoran Strike novels as intentional echoes of her Harry Potter septology, with each new murder mystery having plot points, characters, setting, and dialogue reflecting the ones in their apposite number in the Hogwarts Saga. I have written up posts on the parallels between each of the series entries thus far except for one pair and Louise Freeman has discussed at length what we might expect in Ink Black Heart as an image of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, PSI detective work you can read via these links:

• Strike-Potter Parallels: Cuckoo & Stone
• Strike-Potter PSI: Silkworm and Chamber
• Patricia Baker: Chamber-Silkworm PSI
• Does Lethal White Echo Goblet of Fire?
• Lethal White: Every Goblet of Fire Link?
• Troubled Blood Parallels with Order of the Phoenix (Reader Notes)
• First Flip of the Tarot Cards: Louise’s Predictions for Strike 6 (Louise Freeman)

I haven’t collected and edited the reader notes for Blood-Phoenix but the real hole in the collection is the absence of a post about Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’s echoes in Strike3, Career of Evil. After the jump, then, notes from Patricia Baker, a ‘Reading, Writing, Rowling’ podcast, and my own thoughts in a Parallel Series Idea review of the third books in Rowling’s two series. See you there!

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