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 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. 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 killer unlike any Strike has encountered before...