Krishna
This is the author’s second book in this name. The first one, Cuckoo Is Calling, introduces these characters.
The story is told in the inimitable style you have come to expect from Robert based on his (her? After all, this is JK Rowling, really) first novel The Cuckoo Is Calling. There is also the undercurrent of romance between Robin and Strike, which continues. Well done. You are left wondering, however, whether the author plans to keep Robin hanging a la Della Street in Perry Mason novels all those years ago. Let us see what the story is.
Strike is approached by Mrs Leanora Quinn. Her author husband Owen has disappeared and she is distraught. His agent Liz, after talking it up, rejected his latest book.
The publisher Christian Fisher wants to meet Strike. Strike learns that his latest book is about a real life personality thinly veiled and is explosive stuff. He also learns that the publisher did not know where Owen is, and what is more, despises him with a passion. He also reveals that the latest book has references – very thinly veiled – to real life people who are impugned. It is a slander lawsuit waiting to happen!
Leanora then directs him to Liz, his ex agent and he finds that they were friends but fell out. Leanora put her career in jeopardy by not reading the latest book (called Bombyx Mori, the Latin name for silkworm) because she was sick and sent it to two publishers before her assistant told her that it is totally inappropriate. When she told Owen that, he shouted at her, upturned the chair (they met at a restaurant) stormed out, and disappeared.
We learn that another publisher Kathryn Kent (a self published author of erotica who slams the door in Strike’s face) had an affair with Owen but now cannot stand him and does not know where he went.
Robin arranges for Matthew and Cormoran Strike to meet in a restaurant with disasterous results.
Strike manages to get himself invited to a party with a girl called Lillian and meets Jerry Weldegrove, who is drunk and is one of the people maligned by Owen. The other is the CEO, Daniel Chard. Michael Fancourt, a famous author, is also impugned. When his wife writes a bad novel, a vicious parody appears in a magazine and she kills herself. Everyone suspects Owen is behind it but in his book, he implies that Michael himself is the author.
When Strike goes to a house that Owen and Daniel owned, he discovers the house sprayed with acid and Own found disembowelled and gruesomely murdered. When Strike discovers that it is exactly the way described in his latest novel, things get a lot hotter.
Elizabeth Tassell meets him in a restaurant and reveals that the parody was indeed written by Own and she herself (in addition to the wife of Own who had the key, motive and opportunity) is under a cloud of suspicion from the police as she regularly loaned Owen money. Lots of it.
Daniel Chard meets Strike and also later, Fancourt. He figures out the killer three quarters of the way through the book but in true Agatha Christie fashion, the author does not reveal the answers to us.
His shots in the dark to recover evidence (a typewriter) his guess about where the removed body parts of Owen were disposed of and his brilliant cornering of the killer in a club party even though the police keep ignoring his leads are fabulously told. As good as the first one, by Robert (aka JK Rowling)
7/10
– – Krishna