Murder & Mystery: A Book Review of The Silkworm

The Silkworm is the second book in the Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith (pseudonym of J.K. Rowling).

About The Silkworm

When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, Mrs. Quine thinks her husband has gone off alone for a few days—as he has done before—and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home.

However, as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine’s disappearance than his wife realizes. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel were to be published, it would ruin lives—meaning that many people might want him silenced.

When Quine is found brutally murdered under bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike any Strike has encountered before.

~ Synopsis from goodreads

The Silkworm: My Review

I don’t know what to think about this book. I liked it for the most part, but then I like most mysteries unless they are really awfully done. And Rowling is too much of a class act to push out a bad book.

That said, I think there were a few issues that I couldn’t look past. Mind you, that is because my expectations of Rowling are sky-high. In any other author/book, I would not be so nit-picky.

1. I didn’t like Cormoran Strike all that much. Granted, a detective doesn’t have to be likable, but I still found him annoying. If I met him in real life, I would have just dug into him about his distance from his friends and family. For example, his well-meaning sister is doing a nice dinner for him, inviting his friends, and he is just grumpy and, worst of all, brings a girlfriend at the last minute without even informing the hostess. Tsk tsk!
2. The book is a bit too slow in parts. Because of its plot and suspense, it could easily have been edited down to make it a faster, more thrilling read. Right now, the pace was just about ambling along, and I could and did put down the book for lengths at a time when I usually sit and read thrillers late into the night, biting my nails with suspense.

That said, I thought the book had a wonderful literary quality. This is all the more so because it is set in the publishing industry, which lends itself to some mild satire. I had great fun trying to determine which fictional character was derived from a real one. I did recognize one person based on Sylvia Plath and another based on Martin Amis, I think.

Overall, this book was a slow boil. Not atmospheric enough to make it memorable, and not fast-paced and twisty enough to make it thrilling. However, I also remember that I didn’t like Rowling’s first two Harry Potter books much, and it took me the third one to get hooked on the books and the writing.

I am hoping that will be the case with this series, too, and I plan to read the other two books published so far before I make any judgment on the series.

What about you? Have you read the Cormoran Strike books? What did you think of them?