A new novel from JK Rowling, writing under her pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, has shot up Amazon’s pre-sales charts in the hours since it was announced.
Out on 22 October, Career of Evil will continue the adventures of Rowling’s creations, the private detective Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin Ellacott, which are also being adapted for BBC1.
Rowling – and her “good friend” Galbraith – unveiled the details of the book, including its jacket, on Twitter on Thursday, and the novel is now the biggest gainer in sales rank on Amazon.co.uk, topping the online retailer’s “movers and shakers” list over the last 24 hours.
In the third Cormoran Strike novel, Robin receives a mysterious package containing a woman’s severed leg. Strike, a war veteran, believes that four people from his past could be responsible, since he “knows that any one of them is capable of sustained and unspeakable brutality”, said the novel’s publisher, Sphere. And with the police focusing on the wrong suspect, Strike and Robin take matters into their own hands. The publisher called the novel “a gripping story of a man and a woman at a crossroads”.
Career of Evil follows The Cuckoo’s Calling, published in 2013, and The Silkworm, published in 2014. Rowling was outed as the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling by the Sunday Times, after a partner at her solicitors leaked the identity.
“I was yearning to go back to the beginning of a writing career in this new genre, to work without hype or expectation and to receive totally unvarnished feedback. It was a fantastic experience and I only wish it could have gone on a little longer,” said Rowling at the time.
Before Rowling was revealed as the author of the crime novel, Sphere had admitted the name Robert Galbraith was a pseudonym, claiming that “after several years with the Royal Military Police, [the author] was attached to the Special Investigation Branch, the plain-clothes branch of the RMP”, and that “the idea for the protagonist, Cormoran Strike, grew directly out of his own experiences and those of his military friends who have returned to the civilian world”.
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