Ready your Amazon gift cards, nerds, because J.K. Rowling has a new novel due out in June. But unfortunately for the world’s wizarding enthusiasts, The Silkworm is a sequel to The Cuckoo’s Calling, written as Robert Galbraith. It’ll follow the investigation into the disappearance of a loathed novelist.
Is it too much to hope for a scathing, not-very-well veiled depiction of the Daily Mail?
The Guardian has the description from publisher Little, Brown:
“As Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine’s disappearance than his wife realises. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel were to be published, it would ruin lives – meaning that there are a lot of people who might want him silenced. When Quine is found brutally murdered under bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer.”
The Guardian also makes note an interesting passage by Rowling on “Galbraith’s” website, about her relationship to the character and why she created him:
“Strike gives me a way to talk in an objective, de-personalised way about the oddities that come with fame,” she writes on Galbraith’s website. “While in the army, Strike had the anonymity he craved; now that he has left, he runs into people who make a lot of assumptions about him based purely on his parentage.”
Surely I’m not the only one now imagining that J.K. Rowling has a Murder She Wrote-like secret life as an amateur private investigator?
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