El gusano de seda / The Silkworm

The snow falls like a shroud over Mayfair, muffling the cacophony of camera shutters and the hum of news vans. On the pavement below a top-floor balcony, a white canvas tent conceals the body of Lula Landry, the supermodel whose face has graced a thousand magazine covers. To the ravenous press, the story is perfect: a beautiful, troubled girl, a public row with her rockstar boyfriend, and a fatal plunge. When the police, led by the impatient Detective Inspector Carver, dismiss the one witness who claims to have heard an argument - “The poor cow jumped,” he snaps - the world accepts the official narrative. It is suicide, a morality tale of a modern-day Icarus who flew too close to the sun of fame. The story burns itself out, and the city moves on.

Three months later, on what she is certain will be the most memorable day of her life, Robin Ellacott steps into a chilly London morning. A sapphire and diamond ring glitters on her finger, a promise from her long-term boyfriend, Matthew, made under the statue of Eros at midnight. Her joy is a warm, protective bubble as she navigates the torn-up streets to her first day on a new temp assignment. The nondescript office door on Denmark Street opens before she can touch it, and a dark-haired woman of extraordinary beauty bursts out, her face a mask of fury and strange exhilaration. A moment later, Robin steps inside, only to be met by a second, more violent collision. Sixteen unseeing stone of disheveled male slams into her, knocking her off her feet and sending her catapulting towards the lethal drop of the metal staircase.

She is saved by a powerful arm grabbing a fistful of her coat and flesh. Her assailant, a massive, hairy man with a bruised eye and fresh scratches down his cheek, is Cormoran Strike, the private detective she has been sent to assist. He is a man on the brink of collapse, financially and emotionally. His life has imploded overnight; a brutal final fight with his beautiful, volatile fiancée, Charlotte, has left him homeless, sleeping on a camp bed in his office. He cannot afford a temp, least of all one as bright and efficient as Robin, who quickly proves her worth by deftly handling the arrival of a prospective client.

The client is John Bristow, a lawyer with a rabbity face and an expensive suit, who does not believe the official story of his adopted sister's death. That sister was Lula Landry. He remembers Strike from a shared childhood, a brief friendship with his brother Charlie, who died in an accident years ago. Taking it as a sign, Bristow hires the near-destitute detective to uncover the truth. He is fixated on two clues the police dismissed: the testimony of a neighbor, Tansy Bestigui, who swore she heard a man arguing with Lula moments before the fall, and CCTV footage of a mysterious figure running from the area shortly after. Skeptical but desperate for the work, Strike takes the case, accepting a fee that feels like a lifeline thrown into the wreckage of his life.

The investigation pulls Strike into the glittering, toxic world that surrounded Lula Landry. He is a bull in a china shop of high fashion and old money, his gruffness and prosthetic leg - a souvenir from his time as a military police officer in Afghanistan - setting him apart. He interviews Derrick Wilson, the security guard whose convenient bout of diarrhea left the lobby unguarded for a crucial fifteen minutes, and Lula's handsome driver, Kieran, who speaks of the model's strange, distressed mood after visiting her dying mother on her last day. Kieran also mentions a mysterious piece of blue paper on which Lula was writing, a paper that has since vanished.

Witnesses and suspects emerge from the woodwork of Lula's life. There is Guy Somé, the flamboyant designer and Lula's closest confidant, who insists she would never have killed herself. There is Evan Duffield, the drug-addicted musician boyfriend, a beautiful wreck of a man who provides a bizarre alibi involving a wolf's head mask. And there is Freddie Bestigui, the brutish film producer who lived in the flat below Lula's, and his fragile, coked-up wife, Tansy, who sticks to her story of an overheard argument, even as the police - and her husband - discredit her. Strike begins to feel the first stirrings of doubt about the official verdict, a sense that a truth lies buried beneath a mountain of lies, secrets, and misdirection.

The trail leads Strike to a homeless hostel in Hammersmith, searching for a girl named Rochelle, a friend Lula made in a treatment center. He finds her, a plain, sullen girl in a garish fake-fur coat, who is terrified and secretive. She was with Lula in a boutique changing room on her last afternoon, and she witnessed Lula make a desperate, clandestine phone call, begging someone to meet her at her flat in the early hours of the morning. Rochelle knows more than she is telling, and her new, expensive coat suggests she is being paid for her silence. But before Strike can persuade her to talk, her body is pulled from the Thames.

The puzzle pieces begin to click into place with cold, brutal logic. The blue paper was a will. Lula, who had been searching for her biological roots, had found not her father, but a half-brother she never knew she had: Jonah Agyeman, a soldier serving in Afghanistan. It was Jonah she was calling from the changing room, Jonah she begged to meet, Jonah to whom she was leaving her entire ten-million-pound fortune. And it was Jonah, running in shock from the scene after witnessing his sister's fall, who was the mysterious figure on the CCTV footage.

In the deepening twilight of his office, Strike confronts his client. John Bristow did not hire him to find a killer, but to frame one. Driven by a lifetime of jealousy and a desperate need for money he'd embezzled, John murdered his sister. He hid in the empty flat below hers, lured her to her door with a bouquet of white roses, and in the ensuing argument, threw her from the balcony. "You're a lying fucking bitch," he screamed, the words Tansy Bestigui overheard from the balcony where her own husband had locked her out. Bristow then hired Strike, hoping the detective would pin the crime on the mysterious “runner” - the brother whose existence he never suspected. The confrontation turns violent, a desperate struggle in the dark, ending only when Strike, bleeding from a knife wound, uses his own prosthetic leg to beat Bristow into submission just as Robin bursts in with the police. The case is closed, the name of the cuckoo in the nest finally exposed.