And she’s keeping the pen name, so there.
J.K. Rowling‘s stint moonlighting as newly published crime author Robert Galbraith was uncovered last summer, when her identity was leaked to the press somewhat earlier than she’d intended. Rowling chose to use a pseudonym in order to escape the intense media environment that now accompanies her every move in the publishing world, but admitted that while she was intent on doing everything she could to maintain the illusion of Robert Galbraith, things were going to crack eventually. After all, The Cuckoo’s Calling was doing better than she’d expected: Galbraith had already gotten two offers to turn it into a television show.
Rowling had already finished a sequel when the news broke, and today, publicists have released the title, cover, and synopsis for the second Cormoran Strike novel, The Silkworm. Amusingly enough, it’s about an author who may have been silenced because of an unpublished manuscript:
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 realizes. 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…
The book will be released on June 19th in the UK, and June 24th in the US. You can check out the full cover (cropped above) at Entertainment Weekly.
(via EW.)
