Very Special Guest at Harrogate - J K Rowling as Robert Galbraith

The Theakston's Crime Writing Festival at Harrogate has just announced that J K Rowling will be appearing at this year's event...:

We are delighted to announce that J.K. Rowling, new to the crime genre under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, will be on the Harrogate stage with bestselling crime writer Val McDermid for a unique In Conversation event this July. This special event will take place at 7.30pm on Friday 18 July at the Royal Hall in Harrogate, and will be J.K Rowling’s first and only appearance this year as Robert Galbraith.* The Silkworm, featuring the return of private investigator Cormoran Strike, will be published in hardback by Little, Brown on 19 June 2014. McDermid said of Galbraith’s first crime novel – ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling reminds me why I fell in love with crime fiction in the first place’.

Rowling/Galbraith, and McDermid join an already stellar list of names, which includes the likes of Ann Cleeves, Sophie Hannah, Lynda LaPlante, Laura Lippman, Peter May, Denise Mina, Steve Mosby and S.J.Watson. The Festival dates are 17-20 July 2014, so block out these dates and join us for one long criminally good weekend.

Blurb: 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 - as he has done before - 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 than his wife realises. 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 . . .

A compulsively readable crime novel with twists at every turn, The Silkworm is the second in the highly acclaimed series featuring Cormoran Strike and his determined young assistant Robin Ellacott.