The Silkworm

I came to this one straight after the first Strike book because I wanted to see if the partnership would hold. The Silkworm was published June 19, 2014 by Mulholland Books, 464 pages in hardcover, ISBN 9780316206877, second in the Cormoran Strike series. Robert Galbraith is the pen name J. K. Rowling uses for these crime novels. The setup pulled me in fast. A novelist goes missing, his wife asks Strike to bring him home, and the missing man has just written a book that insults nearly everyone he knows.

Owen Quine is the missing writer. Years ago he had one well regarded novel called Hobart's Sin and has spent a long time trying to repeat it. He is vain, needy, often cruel at home and in public, and still oddly magnetic to people who want to be close to books. His wife Leonora lives a small, tired life caring for their grown daughter Orlando, who has learning disabilities and a frank, sweet way of speaking that cuts through adult lies. Leonora does not come in with drama. She thinks Owen has wandered off again to punish her or to chase his girlfriend, and she wants him found before money runs out completely. Strike takes the case partly because Leonora reminds him of clients who get ignored, and partly because the agency still needs paying work.

The girlfriend is Kathryn Kent, who writes fantasy erotica and believes Owen will leave his wife for her. Then there is Pippa Midgley, a young trans woman and aspiring writer who idolized Owen after taking his class. Owen also has an agent, Elizabeth Tassel, who is sharp tongued and failing, an editor named Jerry Waldegrave who drinks too much and looks exhausted, a publisher named Daniel Chard who runs the small literary house Roper Chard, and a former friend turned famous rival named Michael Fancourt. All of them appear in Owen's new manuscript in disguised but recognizable form. The manuscript is called Bombyx Mori, which is Latin for silkworm, and it is vile on purpose. It describes abuse, bodies, sex used as punishment, and characters who are easy to map onto real people. Strike gets a copy early and reads it with growing disgust, not because he shocks easily but because he can see what publication would do. Anyone named in it would want it stopped.

Robin Ellacott is now working full time for Strike, though her title and pay still lag behind what she actually does. Her fiance Matthew hates the job and hates the hours. He wants her in a safer office role, home for dinner, planning a wedding his mother can attend. Robin wants to learn surveillance, to take statements properly, to be allowed into rooms where things happen. Strike wants to protect her and also will not admit how much he relies on her memory and calm. Their tension drives a lot of this book. She goes out to interview prickly literary people while wearing plain clothes and carrying a notebook, and she is better at it than Strike expects. He sends her into a publishing party, into shops, into conversations with wives and assistants. She brings back exact phrases and small observations about who poured drinks for whom. It reminded me of the first book, only now Robin pushes back when Strike holds her at arm's length.

For the first third I read it as a missing person story. Strike traces Owen's last days through London. He visits the house Owen shared with Leonora and Orlando, cramped and full of unwashed cups. He meets Kathryn in her flat full of manuscripts. He meets Tassel in her messy agency office where she bullies a young assistant. He meets Waldegrave at home where his marriage is coming apart. He meets Chard in his polished publishing rooms where politeness covers fear. He meets Fancourt at a dinner where the famous author holds court and barely hides his contempt for Owen. Each person admits Owen was difficult and each claims not to have seen him for days. Strike also learns the manuscript was leaked to a few hands, copied, talked about in pubs. That leak matters because it gives several people a reason to want Owen quiet.

Then the book turns. Owen is found dead in a derelict house that once belonged to a dead writer named Joe North. The body has been mutilated and staged to match the ending of Bombyx Mori, with acid burns and a grotesque tableau. Police arrest Leonora quickly. She has no money for a good lawyer, she gave confused answers, she had motive on paper, and her DNA or traces place her near things the police can explain in a simple way. Strike does not believe she did it. Not from sentiment exactly. He has watched her with Orlando and he has listened to how little she understands about publishing and plotting. She could not have planned something so theatrical and so careful. He tells her he will keep working, even though she cannot pay much, and Robin backs him without being asked.

A missing writer and a poison book

What makes this mystery different from the first is the manuscript at the center. Bombyx Mori is a story inside the story, and Galbraith, writing as Rowling, lets us read summaries and excerpts through Strike's eyes without printing the whole ugly thing. In the inner novel, a writer figure named Bombyx meets creatures and people who feed on him. There is a Tick who drains him, a Harpy with a damaged body, a Cutter who destroys work, a figure called Phallus Impudicus who is tied to Chard, and a famous author figure called Vainglorious tied to Fancourt. The names are crude and the punishments described are worse. I skimmed some descriptions because the point lands without dwelling. The point is that Owen wrote revenge as fantasy and handed copies to the very people who would recognize themselves.

Strike's job becomes literary as much as physical. He has to figure out who received which draft and when, who typed what, who had access to the house where Owen died, who knew about Joe North's old place. A lot of interviews circle the same questions. Did you read it. Who did you show it to. Where were you the night Owen vanished. The repetition could have bored me but the voices kept it alive. Kathryn is defensive and romantic about Owen in a way that makes her blind. Pippa is furious and loyal and grieving for a mentor who used her. Tassel is cutting and tired and seems to hate everyone, including herself. Waldegrave is sad and coughing and honest about his drinking in flashes. Chard is formal and private and clearly terrified of scandal. Fancourt is confident and cold and speaks about art as if it excuses cruelty.

I thought the publishing detail was the strongest part of the middle. Galbraith knows this world or researched it well. Advances, royalties, remaindered books, editors who fight for strange novels, agents who keep hopeless clients out of habit, prize committees, review grudges that last decades. One scene in the Roper Chard office shows how a publisher can kill a book quietly by delaying, by losing enthusiasm, by letting gossip do the work. Another scene shows a young editor named Nina Lascelles helping Strike because she loves books and likes him, and because she is junior enough to still answer questions directly. Those office politics give the murder a motive that feels adult. Not jealousy over a lover, though there is that too, but fear of ruin, fear of being exposed as a fraud or a bigot or a thief of other people's work.

Strike and Robin, eight months on

Eight months have passed since the Lula Landry case. Strike is slightly less broke but not comfortable. He has more clients, including a nasty tabloid man named Dominic Culpepper who wants dirt, but he still counts cabs and still sleeps in the office sometimes. His leg hurts in wet weather and he ignores doctor advice. His sister Lucy fusses over him. His half brother Al, from his rock star father's other family, offers help and connections. His ex Charlotte sends messages that unsettle him. She is engaged to someone rich and still pulls at him from a distance. Strike deletes, answers late, pretends not to care, and cares.

Robin has changed more. She takes a training course in surveillance when she can, practices following without being seen, learns to write notes that will stand up if police ask. She and Matthew fight about money and time and risk. Matthew's mother is ill, the wedding gets pushed, and Robin misses family events because a stakeout runs long. I found those fights painful because both people have a point. Matthew is not a monster here, just a man who wants a normal life and keeps discovering his partner wants something else. Robin lies to him by omission a few times, then hates herself for it, then does it again because the work matters. One night she comes home late smelling of rain and chips and he has kept food warm too long. Nothing cruel happens, which somehow makes it sadder.

Their working relationship has a new edge. Strike praises Robin to clients but warns her off danger. She disobeys twice, both times for reasons I understood. Once she interviews a hostile witness alone because Strike is busy and the window will close. Once she follows someone into a street she should have avoided. Strike shouts at her after, then apologizes in his clumsy way by arranging proper investigative training as a Christmas gift and by trusting her with a larger role in the trap at the end. That slow shift from temp to partner is the emotional spine of the book. No romance happens between them, which I appreciated. There is attraction, acknowledged and shelved, and a stronger thing growing which is professional respect.

The publishing crowd

I want to linger on the suspects because they carry the novel. Owen Quine himself never gets a live scene except in memory, but his presence fills rooms. People imitate his laugh, quote his insults, show bruises he left. Leonora remembers a younger kind man who read to Orlando and then drank and stayed out. Kathryn remembers great sex and promises about a cottage. Pippa remembers a teacher who said her writing mattered when her own mother would not speak to her. Waldegrave remembers a talent that curdled. Chard remembers an embarrassment he published too long. Fancourt remembers a thief and a rival. Tassel remembers twenty years of favors and threats.

Tassel interested me most on first read. She went to university with Fancourt, wanted to be a writer, failed, became an agent, and now handles books she despises while her own manuscript sits in a drawer. She is rude to staff, rude to Strike, rude to police, and occasionally so precise about publishing that you listen despite the rudeness. Waldegrave is her opposite, soft where she is hard, and his alcoholism is written without glamour. He shakes, he forgets, he tries to be kind to his wife and fails. Chard is harder to read on purpose. He is gay and closeted in a way that matters to the manuscript's cruelty, and his shame makes him vulnerable to pressure. Fancourt is the success story who claims to defend difficult art while treating women badly in his life and on the page. Galbraith does not hide her dislike of that type.

Kathryn and Pippa could have been caricatures and mostly avoid it. Kathryn writes books the literary world sneers at and knows it, and her pride in her sales and fans feels real. She loved Owen in a messy way and also needed him to say her work was good. Pippa is young and raw, dealing with transition, money trouble, and rejection at home, and Owen gave her attention when few did. Her grief is loud and physical. She shouts, she cries, she threatens. Strike treats both women with more patience than the police do, and Robin especially watches out for Pippa. There is a scene where Robin sits with Pippa in a cafe and just listens while Pippa talks about surgery costs and writing and Owen, and it does more for the case than three aggressive interviews because Pippa finally hands over a detail about timing.

Nina Lascelles deserves a mention too. She is junior, clever, attracted to Strike, and useful without being a plot device. She smuggles pages, explains who hated whom at parties, warns Strike when Chard is lying. Strike flirts a little, enjoys it, then steps back because he knows a witness is not a girlfriend. Matthew would hate that storyline if he knew the half of it, and Robin notices more than she says. Those small jealousies stay in the background where they belong.

How the murder works

I will keep the mechanics vague enough to preserve the turn but clear enough to show why it works. The killer uses the manuscript as both weapon and cover. First comes a fake disappearance, arranged with Owen's cooperation or staged to look that way, with sightings and phone calls that mislead about time. Then comes the murder in a house most people had forgotten, a place tied to old literary history that only a few knew was empty and accessible. The body is arranged to look like the end of Bombyx Mori, which pushes police toward people who had read the ending and had reason to hate Owen. Acid is used to destroy evidence and to echo the book's violence. It is grisly without pages of gore. Galbraith focuses on Strike's reaction, the smell, the flies, the practical horror of carrying a body up stairs, rather than on lingering description.

The clever part is authorship. Strike starts asking not who killed Owen but who wrote what. Which pages are really Owen's, with his tics and repetitions and stolen phrases, and which pages sound like someone else doing Owen. He notices that one character portrayal does not fit. Fancourt as Vainglorious reads wrong for what Owen felt about Fancourt, too admiring in one place and too crude in another. He notices that threats Owen supposedly made do not match Owen's habits. He notices who benefits if the book is seen as Owen's last rant versus who benefits if parts were added later to point at certain readers. Robin helps by lining up drafts by date, asking assistants what they typed, checking who asked for copies and who returned them with notes.

Motive grows out of an old wound. Years earlier, Fancourt's wife Elspeth wrote a novel that was mocked by a cruel parody, and she killed herself. Fancourt blamed Owen and Tassel's circle. That grief never healed and shaped publishing friendships for decades. Owen later learned something damaging about Tassel and used it to keep her tied to him as his agent, demanding she place unpublishable work and cover his life. When Owen brought her the idea for Bombyx Mori, she saw a chance to rewrite it, to settle scores, to stage a disappearance with him and then kill him in a way that would look like revenge by one of his victims. Leonora, poor and confused and already disliked by Owen's friends, would take the blame. On paper it almost works. Police like simple stories, and a wife with no alibi is simple.

The trap Strike sets is one of my favorite sequences in the series so far. He uses his brother Al to get into a literary party, separates Fancourt from the crowd, brings Tassel into the same small room, and talks through the authorship problem out loud. He does not shout or wave proof. He lists what only the real author would know, who asked for what draft, who knew about the house, who moved a bag, who cleaned a car. Robin waits outside with police contacts and with a phone ready. The killer tries to leave and finds the door held not by force but by witnesses. It lands because the solution honors the theme. A book about people eaten alive gets solved by reading closely.

What drags and what sings

This is longer than it needs to be, though I say that with affection. At 464 pages it carries extra meals, extra walks, extra interviews that restate what we know. A subplot with Culpepper and phone hacking feels dated now and mostly serves to show Strike refusing dirty work. Some publishing in jokes repeat. A dinner party runs long. Waldegrave's marriage pain is moving but gets three scenes when two would do. Readers who want pace may fidget in the middle third when Strike interviews the same circle twice with small differences. I did not skim, but I slowed around page 300 when another long literary lunch arrived.

The handling of Pippa divided readers when the book came out, and I should name that. Pippa is a trans woman written by Rowling years before later public debates, and some passages focus on her voice and body in ways that feel intrusive now. Galbraith tries for sympathy through Robin's eyes, and Pippa's grief and loyalty are real, but a few descriptions linger on physical detail that a cis character would not get. I noticed it and wished an editor had trimmed those lines. It did not ruin the book for me, but it is fair to warn new readers that those pages have not aged well in tone even as the plot treats Pippa as a person with motives and dignity.

What sings is the central relationship and the fairness of the puzzle. Clues are there. Drafts, bags, cars, keys, cleaning, timing of sightings, who knew the North house was open. On reread of my notes I saw two hints I had missed about Tassel's knowledge and one about Fancourt's inconsistency. The partnership scenes sing too. Robin learning to follow on foot without being made. Strike teaching her to memorize number plates by saying them aloud. Sharing chips on a stakeout. Arguing about pay. Laughing at Chard's terrible party wine. Those small domestic beats hold a grim murder story together. Galbraith, who built a school out of staircases and timetables, is good at workplaces, and the detective agency feels like a workplace here, with rotas and receipts and tired feet.

Violence is strong in the murder tableau but not constant. Most of the book is talk. Sex in the manuscript is described in summary rather than in pornographic detail, which I appreciated. Language is adult. Content notes include domestic neglect, alcoholism, suicide in backstory, transphobia from characters, homophobia in the manuscript's cruelty, and the staged mutilation with acid. None of it felt inserted for shock except perhaps one manuscript passage that goes further than needed to make its point about Chard. If you disliked the fashion world cruelty in book one, the literary cruelty here may bother you more because it is personal. Writers wounding writers leaves marks.

Acid, houses, and settling accounts

The house where Owen dies stayed with me. An old writer's home left to rot, full of dust sheets and mouse droppings, with a studio or back room that can be locked from inside in a tricky way. Strike visits twice, first with police tape up and then alone to test doors and light. He measures how sound carries, whether neighbors would hear, how long bleach and acid smells linger. Those practical checks echo book one, where Strike clapped in flats to test echo. Here he lifts lids, looks at drains, asks who bought cleaning fluid and when. Detecting as housekeeping again, only darker because the house itself feels like a grave for failed books.

Leonora and Orlando give the ending its weight. Once Leonora is released, there is no big celebration. She worries about rent, about Orlando asking where Dad is, about what neighbors think. Fancourt, to his credit, acknowledges that Owen's original pages had value apart from cruelty and offers to help see them handled decently, with an introduction that places them honestly. Strike does not forgive Fancourt for his arrogance but accepts the gesture because it helps Leonora get money. Robin gets her training courses and a proper role. Matthew gets a delayed wedding and a fiancee who finally says plainly that she wants to be a detective. He does not fully accept it, but he hears it.

If you read book one for the puzzle, read this for the ecosystem. Fashion in book one used bodies. Publishing here uses words, and words leave paper trails. Strike follows paper. Who printed, who bound, who carried a parcel, who left a ribbon or a bag. A missing bag and a borrowed car do more work than a fingerprint. I admired that thrift even when the middle sagged. A pen name author writing about a failed novelist writing a poison book could have collapsed into jokes. Instead it stays grounded in rent and childcare and bus fares. Owen was a bad husband and a difficult friend, but he was also a father whose daughter asks simple questions no adult can answer cleanly.

Facts held: first published June 19, 2014 by Mulholland Books in the United States, 464 pages in hardcover, ISBN 9780316206877, author Robert Galbraith, series Cormoran Strike book two. First UK edition June 19, 2014 by Sphere Books noted. Summary follows the US text.