The Silkworm, the second installment of the Robert Galbraith (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling) detective novels, came out last week, and we’re beginning to see a pattern. Critics have noted that Rowling largely writes these novels to form. Even her brooding, war-injured private eye, Cormoran Strike, reads as a recognizable type. But Rowling also makes a significant—and surprisingly overlooked—deviation in her update to the detective genre. Unlike most crime narratives, which unfold in generalized settings—city, countryside, or geopolitical struggle—the Galbraith novels are embedded in niche contemporary subcultures.

Take The Cuckoo’s Calling. The death of supermodel Lula Landry immerses Strike in the world of modern celebrity: paparazzi, coked-up rockers, flamboyant designers, and tabloid nightmares. In The Silkworm, the disappearance of Owen Quine, an eccentric, third-rate writer, unearths the bizarre underworld of the publishing industry. In both novels, solving the murder involves a kind of anthropological investigation of the characters and practices that comprise each subculture. It’s cultural commentary through genre fiction, and since Rowling is one of the most famous and successful writers of our time, it’s hard not to feel like we’re getting the inside scoop.

So what does Rowling really think of the literati?

The line-up of murder suspects gives us a few hints: a boozy editor; a powerful though closeted publisher who retreats to the countryside to paint naked youths; a jealous literary agent whose own writing is “deplorably derivative”; a much-revered but pompous and sexist novelist; a writer of “bloody awful erotic fantasy”; and the victim’s wife, who ignores his books until they have “proper covers.” Then there’s Owen Quine himself, a middle-aged writer riding out his career on a novel published years before—the only decent work of literature he’s produced. Quine is so desperate for adulation that he habitually persuades his mistress to mock-interview him. Even his disappearance is initially disregarded as a publicity stunt to garner attention for his latest manuscript—a thinly disguised exposé of the above figures.

To judge by this cast, it seems that Rowling has a few bones to pick with the literary world. And that’s putting it delicately. Their relationships, as Rowling represents them, are convoluted to a degree bordering on the incestuous. Indeed, the book-within-the-book, Quine’s manuscript, abounds with strange sexual couplings suggesting the depraved nature of their warped alliances turned rivalries turned Jacobean revenge dramas. Rowling’s point seems to be that this is a culture narrowly interbred.