When novelist Owen Quine goes missing his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. She thinks he has gone off by himself for a few days and she wants Strike to find him. But as Strike investigates it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance. 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...