Robert Galbraith · 2014 · thriller

The second Cormoran Strike novel. A novelist nobody much likes disappears after finishing a manuscript that libels everyone he has ever worked with - and turns up in a derelict Talgarth Road house, killed in the exact manner of a character in his own unpublished book.

1. 1
   Denmark Street

   Cormoran Strike's office above a guitar shop in Soho, where a woman with no money asks him to find her husband - a novelist who has walked out before and always come back, and this time has not.

2. 2
   Chelsea

   The literary world Owen Quine has spent a career being tolerated by - agents, editors and a manuscript called Bombyx Mori in which every one of them appears, grotesquely, under a thin disguise.

3. 3
   Devon

   A writers' retreat Quine was said to have gone to, checked and found empty - the one stretch of the book outside London, and Strike driving there on a prosthetic leg he should not be driving on.

4. 4
   Talgarth Road

   The derelict house Quine co-owned, where he is found trussed, disembowelled and doused in acid exactly as a character dies in his own unpublished manuscript - which narrows the suspects to people who had read it.

5. 5
   Denmark Street

   Back to the office, and the solution turning on who could have read Bombyx Mori before it was submitted - and Robin Ellacott, who is better at this than her job title admits, being the one who works it out.