Chris Everett

This is one of the nastiest books I’ve ever read. The casual vacancy in the council is a flimsy peg on which to hang a plethora of violence, sex and extremely foul language as well as a cast of cliched, dysfunctional, mean, scheming characters, linked in very contrived fashion. I nearly stopped reading it several times, but the book, (all overblown 568 pages of it), has some of the same fascination as a slow-motion car crash – will anyone survive? Rowling takes every opportunity to lower the bar of taste. The vacancy is filled anti-climactically well before the end and the book limps to a dull end with a melodramatic tragedy and a belated attempt to rehabilitate one of the victims.