The Hallmarked Blurb:

My initial thoughts

The Hallmarked Blurb: My initial thoughts

As I said a few days ago, when covers come, can blurbs be far behind? We got our answer today with the release of the first pre-publication blurb of The Hallmarked Man.

There's a lot to mull over here, so tune in after the jump.

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The line that seems to have gotten most attention in online fan communities is "Robin seems increasingly committed to her boyfriend, policeman Ryan Murphy." This suggests that we will not, as many have hoped, see Robin call off her getaway with Ryan and double back to get clarification on exactly what Strike was trying to communicate when he said the late Charlotte Campbell-Ross "knew I was in love with you." Rather it seems more likely that, as I predicted here, Robin will have another vacation ruined by obsessively mulling over Strike and when he means to her before again coming to the wrong conclusion. While this aspect of the blurb is disappointing to hard-core shippers who really have had enough of this drawn-out and missed signal-plagued pre-romance, I am excited by the potential connection to the Maldives (Book 4) and Zermatt (Book 6), which would be more evidence in favor of the Double-Wedding Band structural model. Recall that this model predicts strong thematic connections to all the even numbered books, as well as to Troubled Blood, the fifth book on the first ring. THM is the fifth book on the 2nd ring. So, what connections are suggested by the blurb? Here's my initial list:

• A dead body mutilated beyond recognition? That makes me think of Owen Quine, whose face was so disfigured by the acid that DNA was required to conclusively identify him. Recall that DNA was one of the emojis Mr. Galbraith supplied as a twitter clue to the book contents.

• The name of the client, Decima Mullins, evokes Lethal White. Decima, in addition to meaning "10th child" or a 10-line poem, is the Roman name of one of the three Parcae (or Fates). Specifically, she is the middle one, who measures the length of a person's life, and the counterpart to the Greek Lachesis. Lachesis, was, of course, associated with Jasper Chiswell, both in his quoting Plato's Republic ("Hear the word of Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity") as a means of intimidating both Amir and Raff, and in the clue that was the bottle of homeopathic tablets found with his body.

  • It's a bigger stretch, but the surname of Mullins can also echo and invert Lethal White. Mullins has several meanings, including dweller by the mill, pleasant, and bald. If we have a client whose name means both "bald" and "pleasant" that appears the opposite of the LW client, a most unpleasant man with a distinctive head of hair.

• However, the description of the case also suggests an echo of Troubled Blood. The mysterious disappearance of a parent with a young baby? Shades of Margot Bamborough. And it sounds like there will be at least a couple of other missing men as corpse candidates. This inverts the central case of TB, where the detectives wound up learning the fate of three missing women, which included finding the bodies of two of them. THM appears to be a multiple missing men case, as the team works to identify the body. But the door is certainly open for our heroes to solve the cases of some of these other missing men, just as they did for Louise Tucker and Kara Wolfson in TB.

One thing that puzzles me in Decima's case; even if just a few random body parts are found, it should be a relatively easy matter to test the DNA to determine if those parts came from Decima's baby-daddy. Yes, there are a few conditions like genetic chimerism that can cause a false negative paternity test, but those conditions are extremely rare and the test should still show the baby to be a close relative. I am more inclined to think that Robin and Strike will find themselves investigating falsified or otherwise fraudulent DNA tests, which leads back to the case potentially involving Freemasonry and police corruption.

In any case, if the goal of the blurb was to supply a tantalizing bit of information while raising even more questions, it certainly succeeded.

What does the blurb suggest for you? Discuss here or on Substack.