When Leonora Quine hires Cormoran Strike to find her missing husband — the difficult, provocative novelist Owen Quine — she expects a domestic disappearance. What Strike finds instead is a murder staged with grotesque theatrical flair, its method imitating in precise detail the most infamous scene from Quine's final, unpublished manuscript: a savage satire of the London literary world in which colleagues, agents, publishers, and rivals are depicted in thinly veiled and deeply unflattering portraits.
The killer is someone in that same literary world — someone who read the manuscript before Quine died and had both the means and the motive to commit a killing that doubled as a statement. Strike and Robin Ellacott, their professional partnership deepening, work through a cast of suspects each with compelling reasons to want Quine silenced.
The second Cormoran Strike novel moves deeper into the British publishing industry, deploying its satirical eye for professional vanity and class performance with particular sharpness. Darker and more technically ambitious than The Cuckoo's Calling, The Silkworm is the book in which Robert Galbraith establishes his own distinct voice — and in which Robin Ellacott begins to take on a more substantial investigative role alongside Strike.