He has recently solved the murder of a famous supermodel (a coup chronicled in Rowling’s earlier mystery, “The Cuckoo’s Calling”) and has acquired a new client in the wife of Owen Quine. Strike’s private-detective business, at least, is on the upswing. Even more painful, perhaps, he has lost his beautiful and treacherous girlfriend, Charlotte, who is preparing in the most public way possible to marry a future Scottish viscount.
He’s a bruiser in his mid-30s, “large and dark,” with “dense, short, curly hair” and “a boxer’s broad nose and thick, surly brows.” He looks nothing like the famous rock star who happens to be his birth father (and who wants nothing to do with him), and he owes most of his grouchy personality to being a onetime investigator for the Royal Military Police, in which capacity he lost the lower half of his right leg. Meet, if you haven’t already, Cormoran Strike. It takes a particularly twisted mind to conjure up those radiators, so why is “likable” the first word that comes to mind upon finishing “ The Silkworm”? Surely, that has something to do with Rowling’s palpable pleasure in her newly chosen genre (the jig may be up with her Robert Galbraith pseudonym, but the bloom is still on her homicidal rose) and even more to do with her detective hero, who, at the risk of offending, is the second husband of every author’s dreams. Four hissing radiators were hastening the decay.” In places the burned, decomposing cadaver was shining, almost liquid in appearance. Fabric and flesh had been burned away all over the corpse, heightening the vile impression that it had been cooked and feasted upon. The intestines were gone, as though they had been eaten.
Rowling auditioning to be Hogwarts’s next Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher? Consider the grisly crime scene of her latest mystery: “The torso had been slit from throat to pelvis.
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