The Silkworm

Private detective Cormoran Strike is hired by a female client to find her missing husband, the novelist Owen Quine. At first the wife assumes her husband has simply stormed off for a few days as usual, but Strike soon discovers the matter is far more complicated than it seems. Quine has just finished a new book whose pages are an almost vicious roman à clef about everyone he knows: writers, editors, agents, publishers. Once published, it will destroy many people's reputations and lives. Everyone who has read it has a reason to silence the author. Before the investigation can even begin, Quine's body is found, in a bizarre and horrifying state. Strike and his assistant Robin Ellacott begin visiting the people connected to the publishing world one by one, trying to find, in an unpublished manuscript, the person hiding a motive for murder. Meanwhile, his own life is full of troubles, old feelings and present difficulties intertwined. The Silkworm is the second installment of J.K. Rowling's Cormoran Strike detective series, written under the name Robert Galbraith. Set against London's publishing industry, it uses a novel within a novel and a murder within a manuscript to create a double structure in which reality and fiction mirror each other. The case has many threads and a vividly drawn gallery of suspects; the truth only surfaces on the final page.