What is The Silkworm about?

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.

The Strike-Robin dynamic advances significantly here. Robin is no longer a temporary secretary figuring out what she wants; she is actively maneuvering toward becoming Strike's partner while her personal life, particularly her relationship with Matthew, is quietly fraying. Rowling handles this with more patience than most series fiction would — the tension is allowed to sit without resolving, and Robin's ambivalence about her own future feels earned rather than manufactured.

The book is deliberately unpleasant in places: the murder itself is described with visceral specificity, and the victim is someone it is genuinely hard to mourn. Both of those choices are defensible. The Silkworm is more confident than its predecessor and benefits from Strike being more established — the dramatic poverty of the first book is largely behind him. Readers who found The Cuckoo's Calling a little uneven will likely find this one more assured.