The Silkworm

Who says dogs can’t fly? My yellow Lab, Stella (pictured above), thinks sometimes she can. She likes to get air time when jumping in the water after her ball. While she’s been spending these hot summer days swimming, I’ve been spending them among other things reading “The Silkworm” by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling).

This is my first foray into reading Rowling post-Harry Potter. Instead of her first mystery with private detective Cormoran Strike, “Cuckoo’s Calling,” I went straight to the sequel and wasn’t confused by doing so. “The Silkworm” gives plenty of background on Strike and his handy assistant Robin so I didn’t feel out of the loop without having read “Cuckoo’s Calling,” though I’ll probably go back and read it sometime.

“The Silkworm” lured me, being a murder mystery set within the book publishing industry. Who better than Rowling would have an interesting perspective on that? I was game to see what she had cooked up about it.

The plot’s easy enough to follow. A novelist goes missing who’s just finished his latest manuscript, leading his wife to hire private eye Cormoran Strike to find him. It turns out the manuscript contains poisonous portraits of everyone the novelist (Owen Quine) knows, leading to an array of people who might want want to silence him before it’s to be published. But when Quine is found brutally murdered, the police zero in on his wife, who Strike thinks is innocent. In a race against time, he must find out who really killed him and why.

“The Silkworm” follows a typical murder-mystery arc, but Rowling infuses it with colorful character development. Who can build a cast of characters like she can? Afghanistan war veteran Cormoran Strike makes an intuitive PI, but this time around he’s limping around while trying to solve the case because his knee is injured above his prosthetic leg. His heart and head are a bit of a mess, too, since his longtime girlfriend, Charlotte, is now engaged to somebody else. Meanwhile his assistant Robin is having her own personal problems because her fiance Matthew disapproves of her work with Strike, and yet she wants to become more involved in the investigating and less solely as Strike’s secretary. In the long run both have to overcome their personal dilemmas to make any headway on the case.

The array of suspects in the author’s murder are all pretty slimy. Anyone of them seems like they could have murdered Quine who comes across as an narcissistic jerk. There’s his editor, the alcoholic; his agent, the parasite; his rival (an author who blames him for his wife’s suicide); his mistress who’s an author of fantasy erotica, and a couple of eccentric publishers out only for themselves. Who did it? Well, you won’t know for sure until about the last five pages of the 455-paged book.

“The Silkworm” takes quite a while to get to its conclusion. It’s detailed, lengthy, and not as quick a read as I originally thought it would be. Though Cormoran Strike and Robin are certainly entertaining to follow, I think “The Silkworm” would have been better if it were edited shorter, tauter and even more suspenseful. Moreover the book says Strike’s about 35 years old but to me he came off as older, maybe mid-40s. I also really wanted him to get his bad knee checked because it’s mentioned so many times in the book how he can barely walk that I felt like yelling ‘Please just go see a Doctor! or go to physio.’ But alas, he doesn’t.

I don’t normally read murder-mysteries, but I thought since it was summer it’d make a good back-deck read. For the most part I enjoyed it, especially for the characters and dialogue. The publishing world in “The Silkworm” sure didn’t turn out looking so hot — it definitely exemplified a darker side of people in the book industry, where ambitions in this case ran amok. The plot and conclusion were cleverly done. I guess I just wanted it to get there a bit sooner.

What about you have you read this one? Or any of J.K. Rowling’s books post-Harry Potter? And if so, what did you think?