KatieMc

Let me have a fangirl moment… I love Cormoran Strike! He is a character that I love to love. To the world he is a one legged war hero, illegitimate son of an aging rocker, and former fiancé of a super model. To us readers he is a struggling private detective who is worried about cash flow and fears that his assistant will quit. His leg and prosthesis are regularly giving him trouble and limiting his mobility. But the trait that I find most endearing is that Cormoran is an eater.

He is a big guy, 6’3” with size 14 feet, who eats Egg McMuffins three at a time. He’s the guy who eats the whole bag of cookies in one sitting. He’s the guy who always orders dessert. When the going gets tough, you can bet that Cormoran will be heading to Burger King. I can’t argue with his technique, he is two for two in solving his cases. Five more books are planned.

About the book… The Silkworm must have been a blast for Robert Galbraith J.K. Rowling to write. It’s a mystery about a writer who gets murdered because he wrote a book that metaphorically exposes many of his colleagues associated with publishing and literature. Talk about writing what you know. Novelist Owen Quine goes missing just as his manuscript of Bombyx Mori is secretly circulating. While I couldn’t really understand just how incriminating exposure through the literary portrayal could be, apparently it was awful enough to motivate someone to commit a complex and highly theatrical murder. And in a turn of life imitating art, the author is murdered in the same grisly fashion that Bombyx Mori is in the book of the same name. In this book set in a publishing milieu, the author (the real author, not the character author in the book that gets murdered) gets to play, poking fun at indie publishing, blogs, genre pigeonholes, blow-hard authors, blow-hard publishers, editors, and online reviews. There is even a smidgen of mpreg to make things interesting:
"Bombyx’s gender appeared to be strangely mutable. Quite apart from his ability to breastfeed he was soon showing signs of pregnancy despite continuing to pleasure a number of apparently nymphomaniac women who strayed regularly across his path."