Troubled Blood, written as Robert Galbraith, has faced criticism for including a killer who dresses in women’s clothes, but has recorded strong first-week sales
JK Rowling’s new Robert Galbraith thriller Troubled Blood sold almost 65,000 copies in just five days last week, amid widespread criticism of the author’s decision to include a serial killer who dresses in women’s clothing in the novel.
The latest Cormoran Strike novel, in which Rowling’s private detectives investigate the disappearance of a female GP decades earlier, was published last Tuesday. An early review in the Telegraph called one of the novel’s murder suspects, Dennis Creed, a “transvestite serial killer”, and asked “what critics of Rowling’s stance on trans issues will make of a book whose moral seems to be: never trust a man in a dress”. This sparked further accusations of transphobia against the author, after her previous comments about trans people, with the hashtag #RIPJKRowling trending on Twitter and incitements to burn the novel. Rowling did not comment on the controversy around Creed, other than to say that he was loosely based on two real-life murderers.
