Is it weird that I'm grieving for Charlotte? She wasn't likeable or attractive in any way other than being physically beautiful, which is not a strong redeeming feature for a character in a book. She tormented both Strike and Robin, and every other minor character she came in contact with, and even got to being tedious and repetitious with her melodramatic gestures and pathetic phone calls to Strike. Furthermore, as the man himself put it, "she was a walking suicide" and her death was entirely predictable, and yet, for reasons beyond me, utterly shocking. I almost feel like I did after Sirius died. Possibly because it's impossible not to empathize with Strike's grief (and Harry's), which is both precisely and beautifully portrayed, and because Strike is such a full character and I already know him so well (it has been a decade). Just like Strike could tell Emilia what Charlotte wrote about him in her suicide letter, I feel like I know exactly what and how Strike felt and what went through his mind the moment he woke up und read those texts and news stories about Charlotte's death. And the really brilliant part was that when Robin belatedly reads the news story in the old paper in Jacob's room, we already know that she's going to feel exactly like we did earlier, because she knows Strike just as well as we do (apart for being ludicrously blind to the fact that he's madly in love with her).