Summary:
When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. Mrs. Quine thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days - as he has done before - and she wants Strike to 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.
And when Quine is found brutally murdered, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a killer unlike any Strike has encountered before.
My Thoughts:
I liked this so much more than I had initially thought that I would. The characters are beautifully developed, and the writing is full of imagery. I could see everything.
Owen, throughout the story, is found out to be very flawed, but also a normal human being. The way he was murdered was in the way he wrote in his manuscript. He had a mistress and a sort of honorary daughter, despite being married and having his own daughter. Owen wasn't very loved by his fellow authors, and notoriously had thinly veiled things about them in his novels.
Robin is Strike's assistant, but she isn't a forgettable character. She wants to be his investigative partner despite her fiancé's disproval and the small paychecks.
Strike is a likeable character who is a war veteran and is still getting over his ex-fiancée, Charlotte. Most of his work as a private detective has to do with catching cheaters at the request of their partners, but he gets hired by Owen's wife to find him. Strike finds him - murdered in a grotesque display. The police's chief suspect is Mrs. Quine, but his gut says otherwise, so Strike does his best to find the murderer. The number of suspects is large, but the murderer is hiding in plain sight (it's Quine's editor). The confrontation at the end is done so well and it's hard to put it down.
This book was brilliantly written, and I definitely recommend it to fans of mysteries.
My Rating: 5 stars
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