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What it argues
The Silkworm is the second Cormoran Strike novel, and it makes the wise structural decision to set its murder entirely inside the literary world — agents, publishers, authors, and the people who orbit them. A novelist named Owen Quine has disappeared after completing a savage roman à clef that accuses nearly everyone he knows of grotesque things. His wife asks Strike to find him; Strike finds a body. The victim was an easy man to hate, and almost everyone in his circle had sufficient motive.
Rowling writing as Galbraith knows the publishing world from the inside, and the book's insider knowledge of how literary ambition, vanity, and commerce intersect gives it texture that most crime fiction doesn't have. The fictional manuscript Quine has written — fragments of which are reproduced in the novel — is a high-concept satirical device that both explains the murder and serves as a formal joke about the kind of novel The Silkworm itself is not. The book is more controlled and less sentimental than the first Strike novel.
What it gets right
- 1.
Quine's unpublished manuscript is the novel's key device: it is both the motive for his death and a formal mirror held up to the kind of thing authors do to the people around them.
- 2.
The literary world's particular combination of ego, grudge-holding, and financial precarity makes it an unusually rich environment for a murder investigation.
- 3.
Robin's subplot — her growing professional ambition conflicting with Matthew's expectations for their life together — is handled with unusual patience for genre fiction.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Robert Galbraith is the pseudonym used by J.K. Rowling for the Cormoran Strike crime series. The Silkworm, published in 2014, is the second installment of the series and the first to follow Strike after his professional and personal recovery from the circumstances of the first book. Rowling has continued the series under the Galbraith name; by 2024 the series comprised eight books, with the later installments substantially longer and more politically charged. BBC adaptations of the first four books have aired in the UK and internationally.
