"The Silkworm" by Robert Galbraith

This is the second Cormoran Strike novel by Robert Galbraith who is better known as J K Rowling. It is better than The Cuckoo's Calling, which was good. This is a very good detective novel indeed. It was shortlisted for the Golden Dagger in 2015. 

The usual cast of characters are here, resolving their issues with one another and with their partners. Private Eye Strike investigates a missing author who he soon finds murdered in horrific circumstances which appear strikingly similar to the ending of his latest unpublished novel which appears to viciously attack a wide section of London's literary world. Every chapter heading has quotes from Jacobean tragedies and a one-legged detective limping painfully around a snow-bound London in pursuit of a crazed killer seems to fit the bill perfectly.

Despite the flamboyance of the scenery, Galbraith keeps reality firmly in mind. I started wincing every time Strike's prosthesis rubbed or he had to limp down a snow-covered street concentrating hard on not slipping. When he interrogates a witness over lunch he worries about the size of the bill; he tries taking the tube rather than taxis despite his damaged knee. Locations are accurately described, from exclusive clubs to pubs to tower blocks. Characters are sympathetically portrayed: they function in the plot but each one has a set of strengths and weaknesses and longings and disgusts.

Whodunnit? Clues are scattered through the narrative with care, red herrings are equally dispersed. I nearly got it.

Well written and a real page turner; I didn't really want to go to bed last night. June 2014; 455 pages

Also read Strike #3 Career of Evil

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Cuckoo's Calling" by Robert Galbraith

I really liked it.

This is detective fiction, pure and simple. A private eye with a complicated background and a dysfunctional private life, not to mention a seedy office and a mountain of debts, is given a last chance in a case that involves a dead super-model, a drugged-up musician, a gangsta rapper, a camp fashion designer and London's high social life. He also has a temporary secretary who proves a more able assistant than could be expected. They trawl through the evidence and all the clues are laid out but you don't know who the murderer is until the final chapter. Classic stuff and very well done.

Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling who, as everybody knows, wrote the Harry Potter books and the Casual Vacancy. For what it's worth, I think this is her best book yet and a very good book indeed.

Far better than the run of the mill whodunnits. It kept me reading voraciously until the final page.

The second book in the series, The Silkworm, is even better
The third book, Career of Evil, takes a turn into the territory of very dark, very visceral psychological thrillers

May 2014; 449 pages

"The casual vacancy" by J K Rowling

Barry Fairbrother's death vacates a seat on the Parish Council of Pagford, chaired by grotesquely fat Howard Mollison. This opens up a feud about the future of the Fields Housing Estate and starts a chain reaction of anger, unburying resentments and leading to disaster.

Rowling's first adult book after the phenomenon that was the Harry Potter series is an update of Peyton Place. She starts like Peyton Place, introducing each of the large cast of characters in a short chapter. The small town of Pagford is an English version of Peyton Place: The rich characters mingle with the poor, connected through the school; every adult has a guilty secret: the only nice characters seem to be the man who dies at the start and his family; nhe teenagers hate their parents and vent their hatred so as to bring distress and destruction upon them; no one emerges victorious although some agree a truce.

It is well written: the plotting is tight and the characters are deftly drawn. She does dissect the complexity of the characters although many (for example, Shirley Mollison) lack depth. I read it swiftly, driven by a desire to know what happened next but at the end I didn't really care.

It begs for a sequel. It really is just like Peyton Place. February 2013; 503 pages.