Nataliya's Reviews > The Silkworm

"...Writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels."

And just like that, J.K. Rowling under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith takes on the familiar to her world of writing and publishing, bringing to light the petty conflicts, backstabbing attitudes, hurtful gossips and inflated egos. The bared claws and at-your-throat attitudes, the dislikes and grudges held between successful writers and less successful ones, the wannabe writers, the ones who can and cannot write well, the agents, the publishers - it all looks like an ugly mess, to say the least.

"The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them."

This unpleasant world serves as a backdrop for a rather gruesome murder (let's just say that a writer spilling his guts can have a very literal meaning, okay?) that matches precisely the final scene in the victim's book. The victim, Owen Quine, is a not-too-successful writer and, frankly, a very unpleasant person, whose latest book seems to focus on trash-talking everyone connected to him in the literary world and personal life and pisses off quite a number of people.

In fact, it seems to have upset someone enough to brutally murder Quine in a way that combines intestines and hydrochloric acid and a feeling of nausea trying to imagine the resulting crime scene.

It, of course, falls to the private detective Cormoran Strike (who recently solved the murder of Lula Landry, earning himself some notoriety and a bit of cash) to untangle this mess and find the killer. Yet again he's aided by his secretary Robin Ellacott who, having worked with Strike for a while now, dreams of receiving some investigative training herself, seeing that she has a knack for the job - while struggling to explain her love for the job and admiration for her gruffy boss to her way more conventional fiancé Matthew.



Rowling continues the pattern she set in the first Strike book. The solution to the mystery unfolds slowly, through the grunt of investigative work, through long interviews with suspects, through long treks on the streets of London, with many false trails and red herrings, guided by Strike's unerring sense and skill. The mystery is slow-moving and lacks the easy 'gotcha!' moments, hinged instead on character studies, allowing the suspects to slowly reveal their inner selves full of shallow and sometimes quite dark unpleasantness, propelled by almost casually shrewd observations of social inequalities and prejudices.

Every character (short of almost idealized Strike and Robin - just for once can Cormoran Strike ever be wrong about anything?) gets the not-too-pleasant but very apt treatment of Rowling's sharp characterization which makes them come alive even when you'd rather them not. The plotting is intricate, the multiple plot strands so tightly woven together that it's a pleasure to look back at the end of the story and see how they all were coming together. And even the annoying turn in the last quarter of the book when Strike has solved the murder but the readers are kept waiting for the final reveal does not spoil the enjoyment of the story.

All in all, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. While not perfect, it captures Rowling's talent as a storyteller and a master plotter quite well. 4 stars.

I'll be quite happy to follow the adventures of Strike and Robin for quite some time.