Cormoran Strike visits his relatives in Cornwall. There, a private detective—who has once again landed on the front pages after catching the Cuckoo Killer and solving the murder of the Minister of Culture Jasper Chiswell—gets approached by an unknown woman who asks him to find her mother, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances back in 1974. Strike has never had to investigate “cold cases,” let alone ones with forty years of history; the chances of success are almost zero.
Yet he is intrigued by the mysterious disappearance of young doctor Margo Bamborough and takes the case, which turns out to be perhaps the most puzzling in his practice. With his faithful assistant Robin Ellacott, who has already become a full partner in their agency, Strike tracks down elusive witnesses and questions unreliable ones, searches for angles to a maniac-murderer who has been behind bars for four decades, with disgust masters tarot card fortune-telling and the intricacies of astrology—and gradually comes to understand that even cases so old can be deadly…
For more interesting facts about this book, read