After ‘discovering’ Robert Galbraith through my bookgroup’s selection of The Cuckoo Calling, and after thoroughly enjoying the first season of the BBC series Strike, I resolved that I would read more of Galbraith’s books. And so I did- the second book in the series The Silkworm.
I’m always interested to see how an author picks up when continuing a successful novel into succeeding books after a gap of a year or more. The author can’t assume that the reader has read the first book/s and so some background needs to be repeated, but the narrow line has to be trod where readers of the earlier book are re-introduced to familiar and loved characters, without being bored witless. But of course, J. R. Rowling who uses the nom-de-plume Robert Galbraith, would be a past master of treading this narrow line, having sustained the Harry Potter series over a whole generation’s coming-of-age.
And so we meet again Cormoran Strike – and here we learn that ‘Cormoran’ is a Cornish name for ‘Giant’- an ex-military Special Investigations Branch private investigator, who lost his leg in Afghanistan. His assistant Robin Ellacott has stayed with him after the widely-publicized success of solving the murder in the first book in the series, although her fiance Matthew is still not happy with her working in a lowly-paid position with a scruffy private detective who now lives in the small flat above his office. Business has picked up since his earlier success, and one of the cases which comes through his door is the mousy, unprepossessing Leonora Quine, the rather unexpected wife of literary personality Owen Quine, who has not returned home for several nights. Owen Quine had achieved early literary success amongst the tightly-held and toxic group of English literary alpha-males, but the manuscript for his latest book Bombyx Mori, the Latin name for the silkworm, had been leaked after being deemed unpublishable for its violence, necrophilia and the venomous parodies of literary figures it contained. When Owen is found murdered in a ghastly scene foreshadowed in his book, suspicion falls on his wife and his associates who had read Bombyx Mori. The literary figures here are an unlovely group: insular and incestuous, jealous, egotistical and holders of long public and private grudges. (I can imagine J.R. Rowling having great fun writing these characters).
As with her earlier book, The Silkworm is embedded in a minutely-drawn London, this time blanketed in heavy pre-Christmas snow. And as with her earlier book, you are given some rather obvious but much appreciated checklists of possible suspects, and left with a clear sense of who- and why- dunnit by the end of the book. But I really don’t know how much longer she can draw out the obvious attraction between Cormoran and Robin, and I really do wish that Cormoran would go get some proper medical advice about his inflamed leg stump. All up, thoroughly satisfying and I’m up for the next one in a couple of months.
My rating: 9/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 