As my followers will no doubt remember, I bought a signed copy of this book at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival last year as part of the J. K. Rowling author event. Having thoroughly enjoyed her debut novel The Cuckoo's Calling, I expected this book to be equally enthralling, sadly, this did not prove to be the case.
In the second of her Cormoran Strike novels, The Silkworm is a tale about the disappearance of novelist Owen Quine. Strike is hired by Quine's wife to find him and bring him home, he has done this kind of thing before, but as he investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to his disappearance than his wife realises. The novelist has just finished his latest manuscript, a poisonous pen-portrait of almost everyone he knows, which if published, will ruin the lives of many, so there are a lot of people who may want to silence him. When Quine is found brutally murdered in bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer.
Unfortunately, even though Cormoran and his lovely assistant Robin read as real as in the first book, i.e. complex and fascinating characters, I feel this novel has been held hostage by narrative rather than plot. It could be that I just did not like the murder victim nor the suspects (this has happened numerous times before with other books, but I never struggled to get through to the end) so I did not care who did it or why, because it did not bother me that the victim was dead. The circumstances of the murder were over the top, which I am assuming was a nod to the irony of the literary world, but it just read as gore for the sake of it and the premise that a writer could hold his agent, publisher and editor to such a literary horror does not feel in the slightest bit believable. It felt like a personal attack by the author on all that is wrong with publishing and I found it a real struggle to identify with any of the characters in the novel, except for Strike and Robin, or the situation they found themselves in, and therein lay the problem. Nor did it help that I worked out which of the suspects was the guilty one early on.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the dynamic between the two main characters and it was good to get more background information on them, both in terms of their relationships and how they work together in the investigation, so I will be getting the next novel, although next time I may wait until it comes out in paperback.
Revenge on the publishing world in more ways than one. 5/10
#TheSilkworm #RobertGalbraith #JKRowling
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