Book review: The Silkworm - Robert Galbraith

 

The blurb. 

Private investigator Cormoran Strike returns in a new mystery from Robert Galbraith, author of the #1 international bestseller The Cuckoo's Calling. When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, Mrs. Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days--as he has done before--and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home. But 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 there are a lot of people who 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... A compulsively readable crime novel with twists at every turn, THE SILKWORM is the second in the highly acclaimed series featuring Cormoran Strike and his determined young assistant, Robin Ellacott.

My opinion.

When I first read The Cuckoo's Calling, finding out that there was going to be a sequel within the year was one of the best parts. I loved returning to Cormoran and Robin. There relationship is really something special. Robin has to be the best thing that ever happened to Cormoran. She understands him a lot better than he thinks, and I'm sure that he would be lost without her.

I went back to my review for The Cuckoo's Calling. I wrote "You really have the chance to follow Strike's thinking process, and although he gets there faster than you do, you still got to think, guess and accuse without the story running ahead of you.", and I think this is still very true for The Silkworm as well.

The plot and characters are even more elaborate than they wore in The Cuckoo's Calling, and I am, again, awed by 'Robert Galbraith's' writing and people-knowledge; truly a remarkable insight in different people's minds and lives.