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I have found Ehrman's writings on the New Testament utterly fascinating, but I have also found that the more of them I read, the less there is that is new to me. This makes it difficult to say whether PP&M is not as good as Ehrman's previous books or if I have simply reached a point of diminishing returns with Ehrman.

Perhaps it's a bit of both. Of all the books I've read by Ehrman, this has the least compelling premise, being the story of three significant figures in Christianity who appear to have been chosen simply so the book could be titled after a sixties folk act.

I didn't even make it through the first of the three. The book utterly failed to hold my interest.

I'm not giving up on Ehrman yet, but I am worried that I'm at a point where anything I read by him will be at least half things I've read almost verbatim in earlier books. I am hoping this is simply a lesser Ehrman book and that the next one I read will win me over yet again, but since the Goodreads rating on this book is similar to that of the others I've read, I am not hopeful.

The Colbert Report was a brilliant bit of political satire, and while I wouldn't say the book form quite reaches the heights of the series, some of it is very, very funny. It's also a book that, even though there is an audio version, seems designed to be read, as there are plentiful footnotes plus margin comments that offer a Greek chorus similar to that of the Reports "The Word" pieces. My main objection to them is it's not always clear when in a paragraph you should look at the margin comment, and it's pretty common to read the joke too soon or too late, ruining the comic timing.

At times the endless list format was a bit much, and even though it's a short book it felt like it was having trouble reaching its length, but overall this is very funny.

It's also kind of sad, because the right-wing-think Colbert parodied brought us Trump, and now even the most exaggerated jokes seem close to our modern reality.

There are a few things I don't like in detective mysteries, and Career of Evil had two of them: serial killers, and detectives-as-victims. The first I don't like because I just find serial killers really creepy, the the second because I feel making it about the detective is both unrealistic and pushes detecting out of the way to make room for personal peril.

If I weren't already a fan of the series, I would have stopped by the end of the first chapter.

The resulting book isn't as bad as I feared. Rowling only has a little of the serial-killer-violence-porn that makes so many of these stories hard to read and the peril stays in the suspenseful area without tipping over into creepy absurdity.

Still, I found this disappointing as a detective novel. While The Cuckoo's Calling took an enoyably plodding procedural approach, and The Silkworm was a brilliant puzzle-box mystery, Career of Evil is a muddle. As it progressed, I began to lose track of which suspect was which, and the solution of the case was humdrum.

The book worked better as a further exploration of the Cormoron/Robin dynamic. The characters are still interesting and the stress put on the relationship by the peril and by Robin's marriage preparations takes us deeper into their dynamics. But I don't read a detective novel just for the characters, and that's all I got this time.

This book also worries me because it suggests that, as with the Potter books, JK Rowling can't let anything be just fun. This book is much darker than the last, with rape and pedophilia and psycho-sexual serial killing, and I'm afraid that Rowling is just going to make this series darker and darker.

Unfortunately, it appears Rowling is getting a lot of positive feedback on this darker, murkier approach, so I guess there's no reason for her not to keep going in this direction.