J. K. Rowling, Writing as Robert Galbraith, To Publish Second Cormoran Strike Mystery

J. K. Rowling (writing as Robert Galbraith) has written her second crime novel featuring PI Cormoran Strike, The Silkworm. (The cover, right, is from the UK publisher Sphere and may change for the US edition.)

Here's a synopsis from Mulholland Books, which will publish the novel here in the US on June 24th, 2014 …

When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, she just thinks he 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 realises. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel were published it would ruin lives — so there are a lot of people who might want to silence him.

And when Quine is found brutally murdered in bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike any he has encountered before.