The Silkworm

Couldn't put this down.

O livro É muito bom, mas ainda assim gostei mais do chamado do cuco... O bicho de seda enrola um pouco mais-valia deixa pontas mais soltas de como Strike finalmente deduziu o crime.

E eu, como química, quase me contorci de desgosto com a afirmação que ácido clorídrico é derivado do sulfúrico ... Mas enfim. Muito bom-dia.muito bom.

If these books get any better I'll be mad at Rowling for wasting so much time writing children's fantasy. More Cormoran Strike please!

I'm so sad to finish this book because it means I have to wait at least a year for another installment! Proud to say I figured out the who, if not the how :) What else is there to say except that I'm so glad Rowling is still writing.

Thoughts Immediately After Finishing:
I heart J.K. This one was even better than the first.

Real Review:
Every time I read a J.K. Rowling book I fall more and more in love with her... she's such a great, concise, and imaginative story teller... She makes you think you know what's going to happen and then completely surprises you over and over. She gives you details that are always completely relevant to the entire story and not just filler. I'm obsessed. (Confession: I'm not saying this as a Harry Potter lover... because... well, I never actually finished the series. I read the first 2 books in 6th grade and never picked up J.K. again until The Cuckoo's Calling. Yes.. I'm ashamed. I will redeem myself in the near future. Promise.)

In The Silkworm, Cormoran Strike and his assistant, Robin, are once again investigating a murder that the police think they have wrapped up in a nice neat little package. Owen Quine, an author with a twisted imagination and a habit of insulting people through making them characters in his books goes missing. Strike finds Quine's body mutilated in the exact fashion that the main character is murdered in his newest, not yet released book. The police are able to pin the murder on Quine's wife, but Strike believes she is innocent. Thus begins a search for the killer out of the vast amount of people in the publishing industry who had access to the pre-print version of the book. Since Quine has managed to make many enemies throughout his writing career, there are plenty of people with the motive to kill him.

The plot is extremely fast moving. I read this 500 something page book in a day, if that says anything. It's never dull. Most of the story focuses on the murder investigation. But some chapters show Strike's and Robin's personal lives and provide more character development for the them individually. Strike is trying to get over his ex-fiance, and Robin is trying to help her fiance to understand her love of her job.

This story honestly reminded me of And Then There Were None because it has a classic mystery feel and keeps you wondering until the very last chapter who the killer is.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of J.K. Rowling's underlying feelings about the publishing industry are expressed through this story, but then again... I can't really say what her motives are. Just a thought I had while reading, since the plot thickens heavily around corruption with Quine's agent and publishing company. Sneaky, J.K., very sneaky. But then again, I think she made it pretty passively apparent.

Either way, I truly enjoy the Cormoran Strike books. This one was even better than the first, and I'm interested to see where Strike and Robin's relationship will end up. Because we all know, J.K. never does what you think she's going to.

Mildy entertaining, not not a lot of substance to these books though.

I absolutely love Cormoran Strike. As engaging as so many of the characters JK Rowling created in her other life, lol, and that's what matters, isn't it?

Went into this knowing nothing of the plot and it made it all the more interesting! It was a bit confusing and somewhat hard to get into, but still enjoyable. Looking forward to the next one!

Cormoran Strike is back, and I couldn't be much happier. After the events described in The Cuckoo's Calling, Strike's enjoyed a few minutes of fame – a degree of notoriety with the police, and a profile big enough to land him bigger clients, plus his fair share of would-be clients with a weak grasp on reality and/or not a lot of money. Leonora Quine certainly appears to be in the latter camps when she comes to hire Strike to find her missing husband – but he sees an opportunity to collect eventually, and he likes her. The missing husband, Owen Quine, is a writer of some measure of success and renown. He's been known to disappear for a few days every now and then, but this time seems longer, and with a special needs child at home, Leonora needs her husband back. Something's fishy, and his soon-to-published next book is at the heart of it. While juggling his other clients – the ones with large checkbooks – Strike starts poking around, and it doesn't stay a missing person's case for long.

Cormoran Strike continues to be reminiscent of several mystery fiction types and specific characters – yet he still feels mostly fresh. There's your typical hard-boiled loaner (Spillane, Spenser, Marlowe, Cole, etc.), the armed services background (same list, come to think of it), the troubled family history, and so on. There were a couple of detectives that I kept coming back to this time around (and I'm probably alone in this, I realize). Strike's musings on the way he still works like he did in SIB removed me of the way Danny Boyle talks about John Ceepak. It's odd to see the two ex-military men in the same light, while on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Yet, it's also incredibly fitting. Strike and Robin also remind me a great deal of Yancey's Highly Effective Detective and his assistant. Except Strike actually is highly effective.

The description of Quine's new book in question was fantastic – it is not a book I want to read, in any shape or fashion, but I really enjoyed reading about it. Galbraith is able to give us enough to get the idea without having to take the time to compose another book in the process – very well done there.

This is slow, yet deliberately moving (like the protagonist, really) until it doesn't need to be any more – once the pieces are in place and it's time to reveal and trap the killer, then it moves on at a brisk clip and forces the reader to pick up the pace, too (or at least it felt that way). But it never drags, never meanders – it's always on point, and is building to something.

It's tough to say that Strike develops much over the course of this book – we grow in our understanding of him, but he's pretty much the same man at the end. Not so for Ellacot – she grows and becomes stronger throughout, and its only a matter of time before she's going to be a 50-50 partner in the agency, I bet – and maybe Strike's partner in other ways, too. I'm looking forward to watching Galbraith develop this character more in the books ahead, but I can tell I'm already getting impatient for it to happen, rather than trusting him and his timeframe. The other supporting characters not involved in Quine's disappearance are great additions and make everything better, helping us understand the characters more (e.f., Strike's family, Ellacot's family – still not the fiancée, Strike's old friends).

The biggest selling point (for me) with this book is an intangible quality – a je ne sais quoi – about one-third of the way in I noted I was enjoying it. It was a good, solid detective novel – but in a real sense, nothing I hadn't seen before. Yet – I noticed I was really “into” the book. I couldn't explain why I was invested as much as I was – but my goodness, I was in whole hog. I have to chalk it up to Rowling's super power – she can tell a story that grabs you in a way you just can't explain. If you've read her, you know the effect.As I read the last couple of paragraphs and closed the book I noticed something – I was smiling. Not a usual reaction for me as I complete a book, no matter what it is. That has to say something, doesn't it? —– Unless, of course, she's talking about a little town called Pagford and its residents. Then there's nothing at all that will grab you.

I enjoyed this as much as I did [b:The Cuckoo's Calling 16160797 The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike, #1) Robert Galbraith https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1373868343s/16160797.jpg 22002305]. I will continue to read each in the series as soon as it is available.

So regular readers of my reviews will know how much I raved about the first Cormoran Strike novel by Robert Galbraith, or as we now all are aware J K Rowling. I was literally champing at the bit to get started on The Silkworm and so by 9am on publication day I had dove in.

I loved the clever narrative of the first Strike novel, the weaving of a story from the interrogation of the major players. In this second book in the series we have more of the same, the key characters are introduced through observations or recollections and then we meet them one by one throughout the book. This is still a very clever writing style as again reflective of the old fashioned writing of Agatha Christie.

There is a little more gore in this book. It has more discussion of the science of murder than in book one. This was necessary due to the fact this book clearly felt with a murder whereas book one was based around a suicide and one that happened prior to the book starting.

I didn't find the story in this book flowed so easily as the previous novel, this I found was down to the characters. I can hand on heart state that I found almost no redeeming qualities in any of them. They were hands down the most unsavoury, unscrupled and downright unlikeable group. This meant that it was difficult to want to spend time with them reading about them. It was a slower read, the characters were at times so similar in characters and nastiness that I had to keep checking who was whom.

The two main players, Cormoran and Robin are still excellent central characters and hold the story together well. They play excellently off each other and make great reading. Strike is still a somewhat man of mystery on which further Galbraith novels can be hung.

I could only give 4 stars due to the slower pull of it and it's storyline. It was difficult to find empathy for the murder victim who is portrayed as a sexual deviant with a penchant for the obscure and a thirst for revenge. It made for less sympathetic reading than that of supermodel Lula Landry.

Rowling has penned what will doubtless be one of THE beach reads of the year. It will be talked about many times over and deservedly so. I am keen to spend more time with her enigmatic detective and his assistant in novel number 3