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HOLLIDAY GRAINGER and TOM BURKE on the most-complex case yet for their super-sleuths

- CAREN CLARK

Brooding private detective Cormoran Strike and his shrewd business partner Robin Ellacott are drawn into a dangerous world of online trolling when they return in new Strike mystery The Ink Black Heart.

Adapted from the sixth story in J.K. Rowling’s bestselling novel series written under the pen name Robert Galbraith, the latest chapter of BBC1’s acclaimed thriller sees Robin (played by Holliday Grainger) approached for help by successful web cartoonist Edie Ledwell (The Nest’s Mirren Mack), who is being persecuted by a mysterious gamer using the pseudonym Anomie.

With the agency too stretched to accept the job, Robin thinks nothing more of it until things take a sinister turn when Edie is found murdered in London’s Highgate Cemetery – the location that inspired her hit cartoon The Ink Black Heart – while cocreator and Edie’s ex-boyfriend Josh Blay (rising star Jacob Abraham) is brutally attacked.

Can Cormoran (Tom Burke) and Robin, along with new colleague Midge Greenstreet (Coronation Street’s Tupele Dorgu), unravel a tangled wed of online aliases and real-life conflicts to discover Anomie’s true identity?

TV Times booked an appointment with Tom, 43, and Holliday, 36, to find out more…

Having initially not known what to make of the situation, how does Robin feel when she finds out that Edie’s been murdered? HOLLIDAY The agency didn’t have the capacity to take on the case, but, for Robin, there is guilt because she’s seen another woman in trouble and hasn’t done what she could. Now, she’s going the extra mile for Edie, because she feels that emotional connection. TOM Yes, for Robin, there’s a personal stake. And Strike sees how much she is impacted by this death, so he wants to back her up.