"Written by J.K. Rowling"--Cover.

"When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Comoran Strike. At first, she just thinks he has gone off by himself for a few days--as he has done before--and the wants Strike to find him and bring him home. But as Strike investigates, it become 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 is published, it will 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 Strike has encountered before..."--Cover