By Sanskriti Singh
The Silkworm written by JK Rowling in 2014 and published under the pseudonym Robert Gilbraith is a wonderful and gripping crime fiction to read. There is nothing amazingly original but the novel is interesting in many ways.Like the previous novel The Cuckoo’s Calling, this novel has the awesome detective Cor-moran Strike, the wounded war veteran with a complicated past and a damaged love life. After the super model Lula Ladary murder case, he is in a better financial condition. He now has his small apartment in the same office building. The previous case has made him a famous private detec-tive and now he has clients with deep pockets.No one can forget his beautiful secre-tary Robin Euacott who is now his permanent employee. Her slightly stuffy fiancé is still the same. The crime that he is to inves-tigate is the murder case of a writer, Owen Quine. The writer authored a book that was a flop and was working on the second one. Anyone who has read the previous book of the series can never resist this second one.Strike at first is uninterested in the case but gradually he finds the body of the writer in a old empty house, acid poured upon his body and his intestines ripped out. He has been brutally murdered.As Strike goes on investigat-ing the case we are introduced to an elaborate cast — the wife, the writer’s daughter who is mentally unstable, the publisher and many more.Before dying, the writer was working on his second novel which he named Bombyx mori, which means Silkworm, with characters which could get many people into trouble. This one fact builds up a large number of sus-pects. Rowling, alias Gilbraith, creates a realistic scenario where London again turns into a sin city as Strike walks through the streets gathering evidence.Quine’s own thoughts killed him. But how, why and when is all the mystery one has to unfold in the novel. That mystery has a lot of excitement and suspense, but the reader must remember that if you usually want to en-joy the mystery then read it as though a movie is going on in your mind, and I assume that once you strike the play button you would never want to pause.The novel begins with a miss-ing case that turns into a bizarre murder. The author has done an excellent job in hiding the killer till the end and one is left puzzled when the murderer is revealed.
(The author is a student of Loreto Convent
)Book: The Silkworm; Author: Robert Gilbrath (JK Rowling); Publisher: Speners, UK; Pages: 580; Price: 499