The Silkworm

Robin Ellacott is Strike’s assistant and an aspiring detective. Competent, empathetic, and ambitious, Ellacott is trying to reconcile her growing love for investigative work with her fiancé’s disapproval. Her instincts and emotional intelligence often balance Strike’s hard-nosed approach. Ellacott’s journey in this novel is as much about self-definition as it is about solving a murder. She is pulled between the domestic life expected of her and the professional life she craves, one that gives her meaning and independence. Her subtle resistance to Matthew’s disapproval becomes a quiet feminist arc.



Ellacott’s investigative contributions are not just intuitive but practical. She does background checks, tracks timelines, and interviews key suspects with both composure and strategic warmth. The novel shows her stepping more confidently into the role of detective while also wrestling with internalized limitations. Her growth is mirrored in her changing dynamic with Strike: She moves from apprentice to partner. Her deepening dissatisfaction with Matthew, though never foregrounded, adds emotional tension and raises questions about the cost of following one’s true calling.

Owen Quine is an egotistical and controversial writer whose grotesque, allegorical manuscript Bombyx Mori sets the whole case in motion. He is both pathetic and provocative, and ultimately a victim of his own narcissism. He is murdered by Elizabeth Tassel, a woman who feels intense bitterness toward him after he insulted her professional career. Quine styles himself as a misunderstood genius, though the novel reveals him to be deeply insecure and erratic. His pursuit of literary notoriety has alienated nearly everyone around him, including his own wife and daughter, and his work drips with resentment toward those he sees as more successful. Despite his outsized personality, Quine is oddly hollow. His manuscript masks a lack of real insight or control, and his caricatures are more cruel than clever. In this way, he becomes a symbol of what the novel critiques most harshly: ego without substance. His death, staged in the same theatrical grotesquerie as his fiction, is ironic and grimly fitting. He dies in the image he tried to project, consumed by the performance he hoped would make him immortal.

Leonora is Owen’s devoted but socially awkward wife. She comes across as odd, even possibly unstable, which causes others to dismiss her, and causes the police to immediately suspect she is the murderer. Her unwavering belief in her husband’s innocence drives much of the story’s emotional core. Leonora is one of the few characters untouched by vanity or performance. Her emotional flatness and unfiltered speech are misread as guilt, but they reflect the burden of long-term emotional survival—raising a disabled child, enduring Quine’s neglect, and functioning on the margins of a glittering world that never included her. Her character complicates the reader’s assumptions about what grief “should” look like. Unlike other characters who carefully curate their identities, Leonora presents herself exactly as she is: frayed, blunt, and overwhelmed. This makes her a suspect in the eyes of law enforcement, but a moral touchstone for Strike. Her loyalty to Owen, however undeserved, offers a quiet counterpoint to the betrayals that drive the novel’s murder plot.

Orlando Quine is Leonora and Owen’s daughter, who has a developmental disability. Innocent and often overlooked, Orlando provides moments of quiet clarity and humanity. Her deep love for her father adds emotional weight to the case. Although she is often ignored by other characters, she says things bluntly that reveal clues about the people in her father’s world. She inadvertently tips Strike off that Tassel was in Quine’s office prior to the murder. 

Orlando’s perception cuts through the theatricality of the literary world. Her statements, though simple, are precise and revealing. In contrast to the cultivated personas around her, Orlando is incapable of performance, making her one of the novel’s most authentic voices. Her treatment by others—especially her mother, who sometimes dismisses her, and Leonora’s discomfort with Orlando’s honesty—highlights how society fails those who communicate differently. Orlando’s role underscores the thematic point that truth can come from unexpected places, and that the loudest voices are not always the wisest. Her emotional arc also quietly mirrors Ellacott’s, as both must navigate the expectations placed on them and find a way to assert their value in a world that often minimizes them.

Elizabeth Tassel is Quine’s long-time literary agent and the story’s eventual killer. Bitter, repressed, and nursing decades of resentment, she feels cheated by a world that never recognized her talent. She is often described physically and is shown to be an intimidating woman on the surface with deep vulnerability buried underneath. Tassel is both villain and tragic figure. Her bitterness is rooted in very real injustices. Once a promising writer herself, her throat cancer derailed her creative life, and she was relegated to nurturing the egos of male writers who eclipsed her. Her brilliance goes unacknowledged, while men like Quine receive praise for work she quietly helped shape. 

Her murder of Quine is calculated and literary in nature, a performative killing that mirrors the grotesque satire of Bombyx Mori itself. By editing the manuscript, leaking it, and staging Quine’s body, she seizes control of authorship in the most violent way possible. Tassel’s crime is not just one of rage, but of authorship reclaimed. She wants to shape the narrative and be remembered, even if through infamy. Her character embodies the novel’s most chilling message: that invisibility and bitterness, when left to ferment, can transform talent into cruelty.