JK Rowling to publish second novel as Robert Galbraith

The Silkworm focuses on killing of a vindictive novelist who has written character assassinations of his peers

• Alison Flood - theguardian.com, Monday 17 February 2014 

Rowling news … A second novel is due under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

The new novel from JK Rowling, written under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith, will feature a novelist who is brutally murdered after writing poison pen-portraits of nearly everyone he knows.


The Silkworm will be the second outing for Rowling's private detective and war veteran Cormoran Strike, and his "determined young assistant" Robin Ellacott, and will be published by Little, Brown on 24 June this year. It is described by the publisher as "a compulsively readable crime novel with twists at every turn", and will see Strike investigating the disappearance of the novelist Owen Quine.

"At first, Mrs Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days – as he has done before – and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home," runs the newly released description of The Silkworm. "But 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 Silkworm is Rowling's third novel for adults, and the second she has written under her Galbraith pseudonym. The bestselling Harry Potter novelist was outed as author of the first Galbraith novel, The Cuckoo's Calling, by the Sunday Times, after a partner at her solicitors told his wife's best friend of her identity. Rowling sued and received an apology and her costs, with damages paid to the Soldiers Charity, to which Rowling also donated royalties from the novel.


The Cuckoo's Calling shot straight to the top of the bestseller lists after Rowling's identity as its author was leaked – although it had already received fulsome reviews from critics who had praised its "male" author's sensitivity to the female perspective. The novel centres on a supermodel's fall to her death – a tragedy which has been ruled a suicide by the police, a decision her brother refuses to accept. He calls on the help of Strike, a private investigator who has lost his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, who, on taking on the case, is plunged into the world of the super-rich.
More