The plot: When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. 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.

But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance than his wife  . 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, a killer unlike any Strike has encountered before...

Ginia Reddaway was appointed as Moderator, and she kicked off the discussion, saying the book was interesting, with many twists and turns,  but 100 pages too long. She later noted how we never really met Quine, the murdered writer as an alive person. 

Jane also liked the writing style and complex plot (especially the greed), while mentioning the movie version which has been overseen by Rowling herself. 

The relationship between The Detective (Strike) and his assistant (Robin) is prominent in the background: Bookworms varied in their response to Robin’s fiancé Matthew: some saw him as the victim of Robin’s infatuation with Strike, and others as a hopeless nuisance. 

Charlotte enjoyed the book, particularly the scenic descriptions of London, and Strike’s relationship with his family. She particularly liked the title.”The Silkworm”, comparing how the silkworms have to be boiled to harvest the silk, comparing this to how Strike extracted the fact from suspects and witnesses. 

Ian described Strike as “Rowling’s Colombo”, and described how the various characters were related to Strike’s background, and how those offered to the reader as the murderer were invariably innocent.

The denouement came as a surprise to most, as Strike engineered a plan to catch the killer. The Bookworm’s response to the book was varied: it made us  re-think some events.  Pam had not yet finished the book, and Gordon had abandoned it. 

However we all got some enjoyment from this complex and thought-provoking book. 

Next up for The Bookworms: A Country of Eternal Light by Paul Dalgarno

Margaret Bryce, deceased mother of twins, has been having a hard time since dying in 2014. These days she spends time with her daughters - Eva in Madrid, and Rachel and her family in Melbourne - and her estranged husband, Henry, in Aberdeen. Mostly she enjoys the experience of revisiting the past, but she's tiring of the seemingly random events to which she repeatedly bears witness. There must be something more to life, she thinks. And death.

Spanning more than seventy-five years, from 1945 to 2021, A Country of Eternal Light follows Margaret as she flits from wartime Germany to Thatcher's Britain to modern-day Scotland, Australia and Spain, ruminating on everything from the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster and Australia's Black Summer bushfires to Mary Queen of Scots' beheading, the death of Princess Diana and in-vitro fertilisation. But why is facing up to what's happened in one's past as hard as, if not harder than, blocking it out completely?

A poignant, utterly original and bitingly funny novel about complicated grief and how we remain wanted by our loved ones, dead or alive.

The Bookworms will meet again on Monday, 29th April. Would you like to read up and join them?