| We’ve now posted a total of 17 book reviews. |
| Available now at the Amazon.com website … CLICK HERE! |
| Any and all books purchased through our website cost you nothing extra, but do help support our ongoing efforts. |
 Robert Galbraith’s “The Silkworm” is a bigger, thornier follow-up to “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” and it leans into the strengths of classic private-eye fiction: shoe-leather work, talk that reveals more than it intends, and a city rendered as a living archive of secrets. This time, Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott wade into London’s literary world, a milieu of agents, editors, publishers, and writers whose grievances are as polished as their glass offices. The case begins as a missing-person search and becomes something darker, but the pleasure is less in the single turn than in the texture—who knew what, who performed which version of themselves, and why.
As a procedural, “The Silkworm” is admirably patient. Strike’s method is thorough and unfussy: long walks between interviews, meticulous note-taking, and a willingness to let silence work on a witness until something true clinks loose. Robin’s role expands in ways that feel earned; her tact and appetite for the job sharpen the partnership rather than softening it. Their rapport—charged by class differences, personal obligations, and mismatched ambitions—gives the book its humane ballast. Scenes of logistics (travel, scheduling, paying the bills) are not filler here; they remind you that detection is labor, not magic. Galbraith uses the publishing backdrop for a surprisingly caustic comedy of manners. “The Silkworm” surveys vanity imprinted on letterhead: cultivated enmities, career feuds, and the subtle economies of favoritism that determine who gets a hearing. The satire never tips into cartoonishness because it’s grounded in work—contracts, drafts, rewrites, advances—and in the way people talk when their future depends on it. The novel also toys with the idea of authorship itself: who controls a story, how grievance can masquerade as candor, how a manuscript can serve as both confession and weapon. Without ever leaving the realm of fair-play detection, the book prods readers to consider who gets to define the truth on the record. Tonally, “The Silkworm” is darker than its predecessor, with flashes of gallows humor cutting through winter streets and fluorescent offices. The prose is straightforward and unshowy, its clarity well suited to long sequences of observation and interview. Galbraith excels at small frictions: a pause that curdles a meeting, a hallway that suddenly feels too narrow, a sentence that lands an inch to the left of polite. The city is present as more than scenery; it is logistics and weather, buses and shoe soles and the way fortune shifts block by block. The plotting plays fair—clues arrive in daylight, patterns build gradually—and the answer, when it comes, feels both inevitable and earned. If there’s a caveat, it’s scope. “The Silkworm” is generous with pages, and a few corridors could be shorter without losing shading. Yet the length buys credibility: when the final logic clicks, it does so because the groundwork has been laid with care. As a series entry, it deepens the central duo; as a standalone, it offers a complete, adult mystery that respects process over pyrotechnics. Readers who want a modern detective novel with old-school virtues—craft, patience, social texture—will find “The Silkworm” a rich, wintry pleasure that lingers after the case file is closed. |