The Silkworm is a tale of Jacobean revenge killing, set in the smiles-and-backstabbing world of literary publishing. It tell of Owen Quine, a somewhat mediocre author of sordid prose, whose last work appears to consist of searing symbolic indictments of everyone he has ever known or worked with, ending with the death of an author-insert protagonist in a particularly grisly manner. It is his last work because while the publishing world is awash with shock, horror and threats of legal action at the contents of the as-yet unpublished manuscript, Quine himself turns up dead, in the exact manner of his literary alter-ego.
With The Cuckoo's Calling, Galbraith/Rowling established a quite distinct literary persona, and The Silkworm continues in that vein, being if anything more profane and grotesque than its predecessor. Borrowing heavily from the same revenge tragedies as its subjects, much of the novel's impact relates to the bizarre and brutal ritual of the murder, and the progression of the plot on the almost torturous stubbornness of the characters.
It's less deft than the last novel; the killing more gruesome, the characters heightened almost to a kind of Jacobean magic realism. This is not entirely a criticism - I don't think magic realist Jacobean revenge detective fiction is either a bad thing in and of itself, or a genre which has yet found its defining voice, unless this be it - although it is to the novel's detriment in one particular, specifically that the Cormoran Strike of The Cuckoo's Calling was a more nuanced and interesting detective than the one on display here.
I also found I was distracted by wandering if, in the midst of this tale of literary revenge fiction, there wasn't a hint of life imitating art, and if any of the less-than-discrete literary types who fail to keep Bombyx Mori under wraps might be modeled after the person who let Rowling's identity out of the bag.
I enjoyed The Silkworm, if less so than The Cuckoo's Calling, and I remain optimistic for the series ahead, at least for a few more novels.
* Disappointingly, Rowling's publicity stills for the book don't feature a hat, although apparently she wore a suit and tie to appear at a crime writing festival, which is almost as good.
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