The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith

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The Silkworm
by Robert Galbraith

I wanted to love this book. I loved The Cuckoo's Calling. And I didn't love this book. But I definitely liked it. I read it for a discussion for my Harry Potter meetup group and it seemed that all the members in attendance who had read the book liked it less than I did.

In this book, Strike is hired by a wife to find her missing husband, a writer. She thinks he's off at a writers' retreat... and he isn't. Strike dives into the publishing world, looking for him. Meanwhile, Robin deals with her fiancé who is going through things of his own with his mother and his hatred of Robin's job.

My biggest problem with this book was the book within the book. It was grotesque and disgusting. Horrible characters in that book were modeled after actual characters in the main book, which colored what I thought about those characters as well. In fact, there were very few characters I actually liked (my favorite was the writer's daughter, Orlando; I really liked that little girl). Worst of all, I didn't like the author who had gone missing. I wanted Strike to succeed, but I didn't really care if he was ever found because he wrote such a terrible book and seemed like a pretty awful character in other ways (he seemed like a good father, but that was about it). I almost didn't care who was responsible because all the characters were so terrible and any one of them could have done it.

Still, I really love Strike and Robin and I wanted them to succeed in the case. I liked Robin getting a little more responsibility on the job (even if she had to lie to her fiancé in order to do a few things and even though she took some risks and didn't get to be the hero at the very end). I loved getting to see more of Strike's past, including how he lost his leg and meeting some more of his family members. Those portions of the book also took me away from the main story, which I cared less and less about the deeper the investigation got.

I don't understand why Strike has this great friend, a police detective, yet he didn't bother calling him up for help or even mentioning him in the first book. I didn't like that we didn't get enough details to solve it on our own (I did figure out one thing and sort of picked up on other things, but there's no way I came up with the real solution; not even close!). I didn't like Charlotte, Strike's former girlfriend; oh, she was a horrible, horrible person!

I'm wondering if this series (which, JKR has apparently announced, will be 7 books) is going to be like Star Trek movies, where the odd books are great and the even ones are... not so great. It's funny... books 1, 3, 5, and 7 are my favorites in the HP series (though I certainly liked the others more than I liked The Silkworm). I wondered, the whole time, if JKR was trying to prove she could write something darker and more disturbing than the HP series, so she put it all out there. Ick. The book within the book was just so hiddeous... I even had a dream about it the night I finished the book. Disturbing.

I have good feelings about the direction of the series at the end of this book. And I certainly look forward to the third book. But this one just didn't do it for me. It felt like a chore to get through,putting up with terrible images and awful characters. I still have high hopes for the next book.