Cormoran Strike

In 2010, Cormoran Strike (b. 23 Nov. 1974)—private detective, ex–Royal Military Police Special Investigation Branch investigator and the illegitimate son of famous rock star Johnny Rokeby (the result of an affair with a notorious groupie)—is broke, and his birth father's business agent is calling in the loan that he gave to Strike to open his agency. Strike lost the lower half of his right leg in an attack in Afghanistan. He had previously studied at Oxford, but left in his second year to join the Army following the death of his mother.

The first novel begins with Strike being hired by John Bristow, the adopted brother of supermodel Lula Landry, who had fallen from her balcony three months previously. Bristow wants Strike to investigate his sister's supposed suicide. Strike also meets Robin Ellacott (b. 9 Oct. 1984), who has been sent to act as his temporary secretary despite the fact he can barely afford her. Ellacott has just become engaged to her longtime boyfriend, Matthew, with their wedding set to happen later that year. Although Strike only hires her for one week, she turns out to be much more competent (and useful) than he first expects, and they end up extending her stay.

Strike's personal life is complicated. He has just split from his long term partner and fiancée, Charlotte Campbell, who immediately marries another man. He is closest to his half-sister Lucy (his mother's second child), with whom he grew up, though he has seven other half-siblings, the other children of Rokeby and one half-brother who is the son of his mother and her last husband Jeff Whittaker. Even his relationship with Lucy is somewhat fraught, and Strike finds himself becoming closer to Robin, who has always wanted to be a detective, than he at first feels entirely comfortable with.

Near the first book's end, after solving the Landry case, and before Ellacott is ready to leave for a permanent position elsewhere, Strike gives her the gift of a green silk dress she had previously tried on at the Vashti boutique as part of their investigation. This dress is significant to both of them, though its importance is unspoken by each. Finally, the two decide that Ellacott will stay on.

The second book begins around eight months after the conclusion of book one. Strike is approached by Leonora Quine with a plea to locate her husband, notorious writer Owen Quine, who has seemingly disappeared without trace. Owen, once hailed as a literary rebel, has struggled for years to recreate the success of his original novel and has fallen out of public favour. Strike discovers that his disappearance coincides with the leak of a manuscript for his latest novel, Bombyx Mori. The London literary community considers Bombyx Mori to be unpublishable; an unpleasant mix of rape, sadomasochism, torture, necrophilia and cannibalism, the hero is eventually tricked and eaten alive by various characters who are thinly-veiled caricatures of people in Owen's life whom he considers responsible for the destruction of his career. The investigation soon takes a different, and altogether more gruesome turn when Owen is found dead. During the investigation Ellacott faces personal difficulties as her fiancé's mother dies, and she must make some difficult decisions about the balance between her career and her personal life.

The third novel begins with Ellacott receiving a package from a courier, which she discovers contains the severed right leg of a woman. The package is accompanied by a note quoting from the Blue Öyster Cult song Mistress of the Salmon Salt (Quicklime Girl), a tattoo that Strike's mother, a famous groupie and BÖC fan, had above her crotch. Because of that link, Strike told the police that he believed that the package had been sent by someone from his own past with a grudge against him.

They work out that the sender of the leg is also responsible for a number of other brutal attacks and reaches public infamy as the Shacklewell Ripper. Strike identifies four potential suspects from his past whom he believes would be capable of such crimes, but, as the police want to concentrate on the one Strike believes to be least likely, they set out to investigate the other three. Ellacott informs Strike that she dropped out of university due to trauma from being raped, and the Shacklewell Ripper then stalks and seriously injures Ellacott in an attack. Later, Ellacott makes a decision while investigating one of their suspects that has profound and shocking consequences for their relationship, as Strike fires her and she then heads off to marry her fiancé Matthew. Strike sets a successful trap to catch the Shacklewell Ripper and drives all night to arrive at Ellacott's wedding ceremony at the end of the novel.

The fourth novel begins right at that point, as Ellacott learns about Strike's capture of the Ripper and that Matthew had deleted Strike's messages to her, which immediately strains their marriage. Ellacott accepts Strike's offer of a salaried partnership in the agency, which becomes very busy due to Strike's new-found fame, but she continues to struggle with PTSD from the rape and the attack by the Ripper. A year later, the agency is hired by a Government Minister to investigate and stop an attempted blackmail against him, although he will not tell Strike or Ellacott the details of his actions. They find evidence of embezzlement against one of the blackmailers, but then their client dies in an apparent suicide. One of his children then hires Strike to investigate the death, because she believes her stepmother was behind it. Ellacott finds Matthew cheating on her and leaves him. When Strike figures out the motive for the murder, he and Ellacott take their evidence to the police. Although the stepmother was indeed part of the murder plot, the actual murderer was the illegitimate son of the Minister, who had always resented his treatment by the family and also had recognised that a painting thought to be worthless by the Minister's family might actually be worth over twenty million pounds. He manages to kidnap Ellacott and threatens her with a revolver, but Strike and the police find them before he can kill her. After leaving Matthew, Ellacott temporarily moves in with detective Vanessa Ekwensi, then with Strike's friends Nick and Ilsa.

The fifth novel begins in August 2013 and ends on Ellacott's 30th birthday on 9 October 2014. While visiting his dying aunt Joan, Strike is approached by a woman who wants to hire Strike's firm to investigate the disappearance of her mother, Margot Bamborough, a general practitioner in London, almost 40 years previously. As a result of their previous successes, Strike and Ellacott (still a salaried partner) now employ three contract investigators and an office manager. Both are dealing with their own irritations: Strike over his aunt's illness, suicide threats from his ex-fiancee Campbell (now a married mother of two), and the attempts of his half-siblings to get him to attend a party honoring his rock star biological father Johnny Rokeby; Ellacott over Matthew's intransigence in their divorce, her continuing PTSD, and her unsettled personal life, brought into clearer focus by her brother and his wife having their first child. The police's principal suspect in the disappearance was a currently-incarcerated serial killer named Dennis Creed. The daughter gives them a one-year contract to try to track down information, although, because the small firm has three other ongoing cases, it takes several months for them to run down the surviving witnesses and investigators (or their children). During the year, Strike's aunt dies, Matthew grants Ellacott the divorce because his mistress/girlfriend becomes pregnant, and the heavy work schedule combined with a lack of communication about all of the issues contributes to many personal misunderstandings, including the termination of one of the contract investigators for repeated inappropriate behaviour toward Ellacott. In August 2014, although the firm still has leads to pursue and has finally been able to get an appointment to interview Creed in mid-September, the client and her wife end the contract, but Strike and Ellacott continue to investigate through the Creed interview -- and strike a double jackpot by both using the information from the Creed interview to find the body of one of Creed's victims and using other information from both the original police investigation and their subsequent investigation to find Margot's body and identify her killer: a nurse who worked for Margot's practice and was herself a serial-killing poisoner. The journey and the resulting avalanche of publicity forces both Strike and Ellacott to don disguises when in public but brings them closer together personally.

In December 2014, it was announced that the novel series would be adapted for television by the BBC. In September 2016, Tom Burke was confirmed as having been cast as Cormoran Strike.[5] Holliday Grainger was cast as Robin Ellacott later in November.[6] Filming of seven hour-long episodes of the Cormoran Strike television series began in November 2016.[7] The series was picked up by HBO for distribution in the United States and Canada,[8] but ended up on HBO's sibling channel Cinemax. It premiered on 27 August 2017 on BBC.[9]