The Silkworm (A Cormoran Strike Novel, 2) Mass Market Paperback – December 22, 2015

This is J.K. Rowling’s second pseudonymous book in a crime series featuring London private investigator Cormoran Strike and his dewy-eyed eager assistant Robin Ellacott.Strike is an ex-military policeman who lost a foot in Afghanistan, and is now just turning 36 in this story that begins eight months after the conclusion of the first book in the series, Cuckoo’s Calling.Strike craves anonymity, much as he had in the army’s Special Investigation Branch, where your background and parentage didn’t matter as much as how well you did your job. But he is one of the illegitimate children of the rock star Jonny Rokeby, and when people find this out they tend to form an opinion of Strike as “no more than a famous singer’s zygote, the incidental evidence of a celebrity’s unfaithful fumble.” Strike has actually only met his biological father once, but he does know his half-siblings, and one of them, Al, helps Strike out in his latest case. In the process, Strike is amazed to discover that Al, Jonny Rokeby’s legitimate son and living a much more charmed life than Strike ever had, is envious of Strike, who has a purposefulness and usefulness that Al never has felt.This case involves the murder of novelist Owen Quine. Strike had been hired by Owen’s wife Leonora to find Owen after he went missing. Strike does locate Quine, but what he finds is his body, in a very horrifying scene that not so coincidentally replicates a murder from Quine’s last as yet unpublished book, “Bombyx Mori,” Latin for “The Silkworm.” The silkworm, Quine once said, was a metaphor for the writer “who has to go through agonies to get at the good stuff….” Leonora immediately comes under suspicion but Strike is convinced she is innocent, and proceeds, with the help of the intrepid Robin, to prove it.Discussion: Rowling’s writing is impressive as usual. As the story begins, for example, Strike heads out in the cold for an early morning meeting, and observes"A huddle of couriers in fluorescent jackets cupped mugs of tea in their gloved hands beneath a stone griffin standing sentient on the corner of the market building.”What a nicely-done sentence. The couriers aren’t huddling; they are “a huddle of couriers.” The image of the cold is boosted by the fact that they clasp their tea mugs with “gloved hands.” And the alliterative “stone griffin standing sentient” adds a subtle rhythmic appeal to the description.Strike then proceeds on to the Smithfield Cafe, “a cupboard-sized cache of warmth and greasy food.” Again the alliteration cleverly draws attention to the aptness of her phrasing, as we can picture exactly just what sort of place would have both warmth *and* greasy food.Rowling pays obeisance to the common tropes of the genre - from noir elements, to Strike’s careful methodical examination of the facts, to having Strike bring all the suspects together in a Christie-like manner to facilitate the unmasking of the killer. But she does not employ the spare prose of the noir writer, exploring the philosophical issues raised by the murder and the suspects as well as just taking us through the solving of the crime.The object of Strike’s investigation being a novelist affords many opportunities for commentary on the writing and publishing business, which I found a bit distracting. It’s hard to tell whether these are “meta” observations of J.K. Rowling or if they should be considered simply as revelatory of the personalities under suspicion. I was much more taken by the many astute observations made about the nature of love and relationships. One of the authors under investigation, Michael Fancourt, muses to Strike:"We don’t love each other; we love the idea we have of each other. Very few humans understand this or can bear to contemplate it.”Later she has Strike rehearsing his relationship with his abusive former fiancée Charlotte, wondering if it fits the parameters of Fancourt's paradigm:"Perhaps he had created a Charlotte in her own image who had never existed outside his own besotted mind, but what of it? He had loved the real Charlotte too, the woman who had stripped herself bare in front of him, demanding whether he could still love her if she did this, if she confessed to this, if she treated him like this….”We can believe that Strike loved Charlotte for herself. Her cruel behavior to him serves to illuminate Strike’s steadfastness. In fact, many of the characters act as daubs from a pallet to fill in the portrait of Strike. Strike’s willingness to take on the impoverished Leonora Quine as a client, for example, places into relief his character as a champion of the downtrodden, as well as his disgust and impatience with his usual client pool of “the mistrustful, endlessly betrayed rich.”Fancourt had also expressed to Strike his belief that men are primarily driven by the need/desire for sex; if a man tells himself a particular woman is “more fascinating, more attuned to my needs and desires, than another,” he is just revealing that he is ‘a complex, highly evolved and imaginative creature who feels compelled to justify a choice made on the crudest grounds.'”Later in the story, Strike seems to substantiate Fancourt’s theory when he thinks about his sister asking him why he stayed with Charlotte:"'Why do you put up with it? Why? Just because she’s beautiful?And he had answered: ‘It helps.’She had expected him to say ‘no,’ of course. Though they spent so much time trying to make themselves beautiful, you were not supposed to admit to women that beauty mattered.”What an excellent observation.Evaluation: J.K. Rowling is a masterful storyteller no matter what name she uses. I very much look forward to more installments of this crime series.

This is the 2nd book in this series and it's even better than the first, which I loved. The plot, the twists and turns, all kept me guessing as to "whodunnit" with every page I read. Just when I thought I knew who it was, here comes another twist. Excellent storytelling and superb writing. Well done all around and I look forward to reading the next one.

Consider the challenge facing a writer who sets out to write a series of detective novels. How can he (or she) develop a protagonist who will stand out from all the other fictional detectives, lodge himself (or herself) in readers’ minds, and enter the Detectives Hall of Fame along with Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Inspector Thomas Lynley, Kinsey Millhone, Jules Maigret, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Miss Marple? (See brief descriptions of these ten famous characters here.)Put yourself in his (her) place. For starters, you could give him experience of some sort that provides the basis for a career as an investigator — say, for example, years as a cop in the Army. You might want to spice up the story by making him the comeuppance of a liaison between an A-list rock star and a druggie woman gone off the rails. Some sort of distinguishing physical characteristic might help, too, perhaps a prosthetic leg as a result of an encounter with a land mine in Afghanistan. The backstory also needs to explain why your detective is living alone in his shabby office; let’s say his crazy, gorgeous, on-again, off-again girlfriend has finally pushed him over the edge with her lying and her antics after sixteen years of misery. Finally, your newly-hatched detective will need a memorable name, so he might as well be called Cormoran Strike, his first name snatched from a giant in Welsh legend in the land of his boyhood, his surname . . . well, let’s just say it calls to mind a process similar to whatever it was that gave an actor the screen name Rip Torn.Now, make the man work for his keepStrike and his eager young assistant, Robin Ellacott, are mired in the rush of routine investigative business — mostly, tracking unfaithful husbands and cheating wives — that followed their headline-grabbing success in solving the murder of a supermodel. So, when a dowdy middle-aged woman wanders into the office asking for help in finding her husband more than a week after he disappeared, Strike jumps at the chance even though he can see no prospect of getting paid for the work: it’s a relief simply to be working for someone with seemingly pure motives.The missing husband turns out to be a famously eccentric novelist named Owen Quine. (Where does she get these names?) Quine has a reputation as a misanthrope with never a kind word to say about anyone. He is also an unrepentant womanizer who has disappeared for days on end in the past. However, this time Quine’s disappearance has followed on the delivery of his masterwork, a novel with the confounding title Bombyx mori (the Latin name for the silkworm). Convinced that Quine’s disappearance is somehow connected to the novel, Strike dives into the web of tense relationships that defined the writer’s life: his formidable agent, his editor, his publisher, his girlfriend, and a famous writer with whom Quine was close early in his career. Eccentricities abound in this literary showcase, affording the author numerous opportunities for satire of a realm she knows too well.Fearing the worst, Strike stumbles across Quine’s mutilated body, and the stakes multiply. Scotland Yard strongly believes that Quine’s widow is the killer. Strike can’t convince the police that murder is entirely alien to her character and circumstances. Working with Robin and with assorted friends and family members, Strike must identify the killer. As a reader, you know he’ll do so — but what fun along the way! You’ll be kept guessing until the end.The real backstoryWhen more than 450 million copies have sold of your first seven novels, what can you do for your next act? That’s easy, right? You tackle a different genre under a pseudonym! What could be more natural?Eschewing the fame she gained with the Harry Potter series, and sidestepping the disappointing reception for her first adult novel, The Casual Vacancy, Rowling created Cormoran Strike and published a story about him, The Cuckoo’s Calling, under the pen name Robert Galbraith. Even before her identity as the author was revealed, the book gained strong reviews but the praise gushed and sales spiked only after a software analyst working for The Sunday Times unmasked her by studying the word usage and syntax of her writing.The Silkworm is the second in what Rowling says will be a series of seven detective novels.

Somebody get this woman an editor.Unpleasant and unbelievable characters and a vaguely murky setting that almost has you thinking you're reading some fantasy world story.I started skim-reading at 85% (Kindle) in a desperate attempt to get it finished, no longer caring who had done it, or why.Too many characters and the "literary" device of character A telling the reader via a long-winded conversation with Strike what the writer wants us to know about character B (very little by the end, I just wanted them out of my life) is tedious and very Creative Writing Lesson 1 for such an accomplished writer.In any case, that's me done with Robert Galbraith. The first one was OK, this was like wading through treacle.

This book is the second book of the Cormoran Strike novels and is written in much the same way, with the chapters alternating between P.I Cormoran and his assistant Robin. The style of writing is much the same as the HP series and as I said in my review for the first book in the series, Cuckoo's Calling, I don't think it works. It makes the writing style awkward and hard to read I feel, I struggled with it at times.Once again the story focuses on Cormoran Strike as he investigates a murder. This time Owen Quine author has been murdered in the same way one of his characters was murdered in his new manuscript. We then follow Strike as he investigates the murder, Quine it doesn't seem is short of enemies and there appears to be hidden clues in the manuscript.I found the book odd. Dislike is too strong of a word for how I feel about this book. But there were many things about this book that I didn't like; the snide almost nasty way I felt the author described the press and the "famous" people in the first book are here too with the added bonus of there appearing to be a complete dislike of the literary world. The snippets of the manuscript that we got to read through Robin reading it, were very strange, they were very wacky and confusing and I didn't feel added anything to the plot at all.I do thing the author has done a good job with the characterisation of Strike and he is intriguing, but he seems to be the only character who has any real depth to them. The story is also well paced, but is quite predictable in places.Of course I might be one of the few that are not overly fond of these books, but they just didn't gel with me. I don't think I will be reading any more in the series, there was more about this book that disliked than I liked and to me, that usually means it’s time to stop reading in a series. So I won't continue reading.

Cormoran Strike is back after his success in the Lula Landry case (from book one of the series - The Cuckoo’s Calling). He’s still eating and drinking too much and trying not to pine for his aristocratic ex, Charlotte, who’s about to get married. Meanwhile Strike’s assistant Robin is impatient - her role is more secretary than sidekick, or so she fears. Meanwhile a not very famous writer, Owen Quine, has been murdered, and his corpse disembowelled. His last piece of writing was a coded takedown of his pals or former associates in literary London. There are plenty of people who might’ve wanted him dead. Strike is hired by Quine’s widow to get her off the hook. Silkworm is superior to Cuckoo, by some distance. It’s pacier and for my money a lot more readable. It is elaborately plotted with lots of characters, as Cuckoo was, but here it seems to hang together more easily. There’s also a lot about the personal lives of our two heroes and this is important - it gives us a counterpoint and indeed some respite from the central plot. Ultimately that’s the book’s triumph - balancing the mechanics of the plot, the meat of the novel, with the characterisations. It’s character that counts - readers remember Philip Marlowe but not necessarily every twist and turn, or even the broad outline, of a lot of the stories and novels in which he appeared. Can’t wait to read number 3…

I am a fan of Harry Potter. But Cormoran Strike! Why did J K Rowling want to write about a grubby, one legged detective, who has definitely chosen a wrong profession, trying to shadow unfaithful wives or husbands (nobody will miss a big man with only one leg), who often behaves like a child (works in potter books but not here) has a young female admirer attracted inexplicably to him who also behaves like a teenager, and is in horrible pain for most of the time. Why not a competent woman who succeeds against difficult enemies? And the plot: an unreadable book which is supposed to be libellous against the murdered author's colleagues but where the characters are so surreal that there is surely no risk that they could have sued the author. The only concrete thing is that the author describes his own, extremely complicated murder in the book and then is promptly killed in precisely this, totally impossible way. Almost all characters except the female admirers of Cormoran Strike are highly unpleasant or unsympathetic. The plot is extremely convoluted and improbable. The writing is bad, with even some errors a competent editor should have corrected. Interestingly, many readers seem to think that this is the best book of the Cormoran Strike series. Would not dream to try another!

This series is so good, I can't believe it took me so long to get to the second book. In this novel, we move away from celebrity (although Strike's famous father is mentioned once or twice) and move on to a world J.K. Rowling knows well and has a good time poking a little fun at, that of publishing.Leonora Quine is a slightly grumpy, frumpy and straight talking woman, so, when she appears in Strike's office, asking him to discover the whereabouts of her author husband, he is intrigued. Despite the fact he has promised himself everything is to be about profit now he is making a name for himself, he can't stop himself investigating; even if it is unclear who, if anybody, is paying for his time. Leonora is keen to inform Strike she doesn't want the police involved. Owen has, it seems, disappeared before. Having asked the police for help in the past, to the disapproval of her husband, she is looking to Strike to bring back her errant husband.There is more about Strike's previous relationship, his family, problems with his leg and also Robin's difficult relationship with Matthew. Will he accept her desire to work as a P.I. rather than getting a better job in Human Resources? Along the way, Strike and Robin investigate what turns out to be the murder of Owen Quine, whose latest manuscript takes a vicious dig at everyone from his editor, literary agent, fellow authors, wife, girlfriend and everyone in between. As with the previous book, this is a little larger than life, but delicious fun and I look forward to reading on.