A Serial Killer's Rebounding Spell: My talk from the 2025 Harry Potter Academic Conference.

 I've just finished up with one of my favorite weekends of the year, the annual Harry Potter Academic Conference at Chestnut Hill College. This year I hosted a panel called "The Mirror of Rettopyrrah: Wizarding World reflections in post-Potter books." 

My contribution was "A Serial Killer's Rebounding Spell: A Deathly Hallows echo in Troubled Blood." 
 It compares Strike's interview with Creed to Harry's final duel with Voldemort. 

Please check it out. 

The 3-5 links to The Hallmarked Man: One set predicted by Double Wedding Band, another not.

One of the reasons I was especially looking forward to the publication of The Hallmarked Man was that it was the first real test of the Double Wedding Band model. (See here, here and here for background information).  In short, I think we see three basic patterns in the Strike series that are best accounted for by viewing the 10-part series as two overlapping rings: the first staring with CC and ending with TRG; 

1. The basic "turtle-back" connections that are so obvious in Harry Potter should be seen in both rings, 
1. Book 2-Book 6
2. Book 3-Book 5
3. The beginning-turning point-end triangulation between Books 1-4-7. 
2. The "ring correspondence" connections, where Book 1 of the first ring (CC) connects to Book 1 of the second ring (LW) and so on. This gives us the following: (note that the starred connections are duplicated in the turtle-back triangulations, above).  
1. CC-LW*
2. Silkworm-TB
3. CoE-TIBH
4. LW-TRG*
5. TB-THM
6. TIBH-Book 9
7. TRG-Book 10. *
3. While not necessarily a part of the Double Wedding Band, there is also good evidence for the Leapfrog Effect: the tendency of odd-numbered books to pair with other odd-numbered, and evens with evens. This gives us 20 total pairings, four of which (2-6, 3-5, 1-7, and 4-10) are already listed above. 

It is the ring correspondence component of the model that got its first real test for predictive power with THM.  I originally came up with the Double Wedding Band to explain the large number of linkages between CoE and TIBH and between Silkworm and Troubled Blood. These two connections are not predicted by the turtleback or leapfrog effects, but are accounted for by the ring correspondence. 

Thus, I went into THM with two testable hypotheses:  

• First: If the ring correspondence model works, then The Hallmarked Man, as the 5th book of Ring 2 (and #8 in the series), should have lots of correspondences with Troubled Blood, the fifth book of Ring 1. 

Furthermore, the ring correspondence could potentially help answer the question that has been nagging us: what happens to the idea of Strike being a parallel series to Harry Potter once we hit book 8 and are out of Potter books? 

• The answer (and second hypothesis) is, we back up and look for connections to Book #5 of Harry Potter, Order of the Phoenix. 

Did the Double Wedding Band model pass the test?  Find out below.

2-4-6-8, What Do We Appreciate? : The Hallmarked Man connections predicted by the Leapfrog effect.

A big feature of the Double Wedding Band model (see here, here and here for background information) is that it incorporates one of the more obvious patterns of the Strike series: the Leapfrog effect, or the tendency of odd numbered books to connect with odd numbers and and evens with evens. The Hallmarked Man continues this pattern  

What I am most excited about is those connections that have, thus so far, turned up in all four the even-numbered books. I'm going to call this the "Truly Appreciated" list, both because I was happy to see them and because I think they should top the list of predictions for book 10.