The publishing world is hot. At least in fiction it is.

Within the last several months I had encountered three books – two of them crime novels and one a parody – that have as their subject matter the desperate, backstabbing, at times hilarious and at times almost tragic environment of that world, in the throes of an epic transformation of the very concept of the way books are created, produced and sold to a diminishing readership. Traditional publishers of books actually printed on paper are fighting a defensive, rear-guard action against the onslaught of electronic transmission of e-books, self-publishing, and last but not least the overwhelming, attention-grabbing phenomenon of the social media that makes the very act of old-fashioned reading a fast receding aspect of our lives.

The first of these three books is Chris Pavone’s "The Accident", a crime novel that received some pretty good reviews, something I can only attribute to the fact that the writer has a background in publishing, is married to a high-powered executive in the business and has excellent connections in it, for, other than giving one an amusing view of the lengths to which publishers/agents will go to get their hands on a “hot” book while, simultaneously, other people are intent on preventing the publication of potentially explosive subject matter, "The Accident" is a very poor crime novel, full of narrative holes, endless descriptive fill disguising the flimsiness of the story, and a thoroughly unsatisfying denouement. I wrote my disappointed comments in an April 17th post; I have little to add to that, except I keep thinking about the vicious internecine warfare waged by the publishing industry described in it.

A short while later came Edward St. Aubyn’s new book, "Lost for Words". This brilliant British writer, author of the superb Patrick Melrose novels, (one volume of which, "Mother’s Milk", was short listed for the Booker prize), answered the question I had about him in a post last September: can he, will he write things other than thinly disguised autobiography? He can and he does: "Lost for Words" is a hilarious parody of the machinations that go into the awarding of the Elysian Prize, -- this time a thinly disguised take on the Man Booker Awards -– from the selection of its judges to the eager authors vying for it. Reading it one thinks at times of Evelyn Waugh, but the voice is entirely St. Aubyn’s, and very funny it is indeed. One doesn’t have to know the very individuals who are parodied, though it might make the descriptions even more amusing. The spot-on quotes from several of the “finalists” for the short list, a position nearly as coveted as the award itself, is priceless. From a Scottish novel of “raw realism”, “wot u starin at”, to the self-deluded Indian “great author” who is entirely certain of sweeping the contest with his lengthy tome “The Mulberry Elephant”, to the book written in pretentious pseudo-Shakespearian language “from the viewpoint of William himself”, and “The Frozen Torrent”, an anguished autobiographical novel (a bit of self-parody there perhaps?), the novels in contention are all extensively quoted from, to great effect. Then there is the very attractive author who will stop at very few things in sleeping her way to the top, but whose submission gets mixed up with that of a hapless, unintended candidate whose chatty cookbook, not ever intended to be a novel, is – of course – the winner by default. "Lost for Words" is a superb satire.

And most recently: Robert Galbraith’s "The Silkworm". This pseudonymous detective novel was written, as is now a universally known fact, by J.K. Rollins, of Harry Potter fame. The tale of her supposed attempt at keeping her real identity secret and the failure of that attempt is an interesting story in itself; the looming question of whether the creator of the monumental fantasy saga could switch gears and take up a genre utterly different has now been resolved: yes she can.

This is the real thing, a classic of its genre: a genuine page-turner with a bizarre murder at the center of it and the requisite number of candidates to have committed that murder, each with a plausible motive to do so. True, this is a formula going back to Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, and other well known practitioners, but all the more difficult for that to produce something worthy of those predecessors. She did. She also created two characters, the detective Cormoran Strike and his sidekick Robin who are interesting, believable people with back stories and aspirations we grow to care about. This is the second in the likely-to-come series of Cormoran Strike books and I am looking forward to meeting him again, and finding out if he and Robin will succumb to the attraction between them they had so far resisted acting upon.

What makes this entry into the detective-fiction world so particularly interesting for me is its setting: once again, squarely in the midst of the publishing industry. The victim of the murder is an author, the reason for the murder has to do with his unpublished book, and the candidates for the commission of the crime are his agent, his publisher, his editor, and his fellow writers. The description of the bitter blindsiding, backstabbing, grudge holding among the protagonists is epic. There hovers in the background of it all the panic that the entire industry is facing: the peril to its very existence. Clearly, “Robert Galbraith” has had some dealings in this cruel industry, for “he” seems to know the territory.

One of the characters, a publisher, says during a conversation in the book: “we need fewer authors and more readers”. When authors are as inventive and productive as J. K. Rollins, there will always be enough readers.