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The Silkworm A Cormoran Strike Novel Robert Galbraith Books

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The Silkworm A Cormoran Strike Novel Robert Galbraith Books

My biggest issue with the first Strike book was that it was too long and too slow. The second Strike book fixed one of those issues. Being 100 pages shorter really helped with the pacing early on but nearly halfway through, The book comes to a grinding halt and becomes another slow and tough to finish read. This isn't an insult to the characters or the plot. It just gets boring and it's tough to read more than a few pages at a time before getting sick of it.

I do love how Rowling gave Strike and Robin much more development in this book. A good chunk of the book is about their relationship and Robin wanting to be more than a simple assistant. We also see more backstory about the two characters' past and social lives. The plot was kind of predictable, Not to the point where you knew what was gonna happen but it was pretty easy to eliminate a good handful of suspects early on. A few typical mystery novel tropes are followed but again that doesn't stop it from being interesting plot wise.

Overall, It's not a terrible book. If you could finish the first then you should have no issue finishing this one. It's not for everybody though. IDK why but Rowling's pacing issue always hits her half way into the book and it just ruins it a bit.


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The Silkworm A Cormoran Strike Novel Robert Galbraith Books Reviews

Novelist Owen Quine has gone missing. His wife comes to detective Comoran Strike. She wants Comoran to find him and bring him home. Quine goes away periodically, but always returns and this time he hasn't. They have a daughter with special needs and Quine knows only he can produce the money needed to keep the family afloat.

Strike takes the case and expects it to be an easy one. But as he investigates, it becomes more complicated. Quine has written a new novel, one in which he skewers many of the literary circle of England. He has a mistress who is sure he is leaving his wife and child to be with her, an agent who seems to despise him and a publishing house that would be more than glad to drop him. Every individual thinly disguised in the book would be glad to see him disappear for good. When Strike discovers Quine's body and realizes that he has been killed in a parody of the novel, the race is on to discover the murderer.

The reader also learns more about the personal lives of Strike and his assistant, Robin Ellacott. Strike is a former soldier who has been left with an artificial leg and investigative skills from his time in the military. Huge and focused, he is considered without social skills yet has friends in every circle who would do anything for him. Robin, his assistant, is about to get married and starting to wonder if that is the right course for her, or if it would be more fulfilling to become an investigator herself. Together the two work through the lengthy suspect list to discover who killed Quine.

This is the second Comoran Strike book and it is equally as delightful as the first. In the worst-kept secret in the literary world, Robert Galbraith is the pseudonym of J.K. Rowling, and she delivers the plotting and characterization that made her famous as an author. The reader finishes the book eager to read the next installment in the series. This book is recommended for mystery readers.
It’s somewhat surprising that publishers have allowed The Silkworm to continue to be listed under the name Robert Galbraith instead of J.K. Rowling – after all, this is an industry where female writers are often asked to abbreviate their names so that sales don’t get affected, so I can’t imagine that leaving Rowling’s name off is appealing to them. And yet, in a lot of ways, it’s completely appropriate – the Galbraith books don’t feel like the public assumptions of what J.K. Rowling writes. They’re private detective books with a little dose of hard-boiled mixed in – they’re occasionally violent (even graphically so, in the case of The Silkworm), suspenseful, and full of shady characters.

Even so, much like that more famous other series she wrote, the joy here isn’t always so much the plot as it is the rich characterization and general gift for storytelling. In creating the jaded war veteran Cormoran Strike and his Girl Friday Robin Ellacott, Rowling’s come up with two outstanding characters that have a way of pulling you along even as the plotting occasionally gets bewildering in the way so many mysteries do. After all, The Silkworm is full of absurd touches, red herrings, colorful characters, and elaborate plot ideas, not the least of which is the central hook – the absolutely brutal and graphic killing of a notorious author that seems to have been inspired by his unpublished manuscript, which mocked and ridiculed pretty much everyone in his life and in the publishing industry.

The result is a pretty solid detective novel that scratches all the right itches for the genre – tense interviews with reluctant witnesses and suspects, power plays, bluffs to draw out the villains, covert surveillance, lots of red herrings, and secrets galore. If you know the genre, you know what you’re getting, and it’s no small thing to say that Rowling generally does it incredibly well. The Silkworm feels silly at times, especially when you try to put it all together – and that’s especially true with the answers of who did it and why – but none of that keeps it from being an incredibly entertaining and gripping read, nor does it stop it from being a really great piece of detective fiction (one that feels different enough from Rowling’s other writings to merit the pseudonym).

But the real treat here is the character work, which gives The Silkworm the investment you need in a good detective story. The contrast between cynical, world-weary, literally walking wounded Cormoran Strike and his hopeful, eager, earnest secretary / assistant / trainee Robin Ellacott is easy and obvious, but Rowling makes it work incredibly well, bringing both characters to rich life and letting their friendship and mutual respect speak volumes. It’s a great central dynamic to the book, and the way Rowling plays with it – and the tensions between them – and uses them to supplement her labyrinthine (but engaging) mystery is what makes The Silkworm so satisfying. That Rowling got so pigeonholed that she felt like she couldn’t write the Cormoran Strike books under her own name is a bit sad; that she’s writing them, though, and that there are more to come? That’s very welcome news indeed, because if they’re all this fun and captivating, well, I won’t be complaining.
My biggest issue with the first Strike book was that it was too long and too slow. The second Strike book fixed one of those issues. Being 100 pages shorter really helped with the pacing early on but nearly halfway through, The book comes to a grinding halt and becomes another slow and tough to finish read. This isn't an insult to the characters or the plot. It just gets boring and it's tough to read more than a few pages at a time before getting sick of it.

I do love how Rowling gave Strike and Robin much more development in this book. A good chunk of the book is about their relationship and Robin wanting to be more than a simple assistant. We also see more backstory about the two characters' past and social lives. The plot was kind of predictable, Not to the point where you knew what was gonna happen but it was pretty easy to eliminate a good handful of suspects early on. A few typical mystery novel tropes are followed but again that doesn't stop it from being interesting plot wise.

Overall, It's not a terrible book. If you could finish the first then you should have no issue finishing this one. It's not for everybody though. IDK why but Rowling's pacing issue always hits her half way into the book and it just ruins it a bit.