Will there be a second series of Strike?

The third novel in JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series (2015’s Career of Evil, written under the pen name of Robert Galbraith) is set to air next year.

Adapted to the screen by Tom Edge (who also penned the Silkworm for this year’s run), Strike: Career of Evil will be another two-part mystery (unlike The Cuckoo’s Calling’s three-episode run) and will see the titular ‘tec face his most personal battle yet when a serial killer with a grudge begins a campaign of terror against him.

When a dismembered leg is sent to Strike’s office, it sends both Cormoran's and Robin’s lives into disarray, forcing them to confront ghosts from their pasts. Their partnership reaches breaking point as Robin’s wedding approaches and they disagree about how to ensnare a man who abuses children.

After that, though, the future of Strike is less certain, with no more novels yet released to adapt and the production team reluctant to do a ‘Game of Thrones’ and continue the series beyond the source material.

“We’ll definitely wait ‘til the next book comes out, and then we’ll start prepping again,” executive producer Ruth Kenley-Letts said at a recent screening of the series. “I literally have no idea what the next book is about.”

However, the team do seem fairly emphatic that whenever new Strike novels come out they’ll be ready and raring to adapt them, revealing that they’d been given hints by JK Rowling as to what would become important in later stories and therefore shouldn’t be cut from the TV series.

“It was very helpful to get Jo’s notes sometimes, because often she knows what’s going to happen, but nobody else does,” Kenley-Letts explained.

“Say for the part of [Strike’s ex-fiancé) Charlotte, which is quite a small part in the first book, she doesn’t really come to be. In terms of casting, you have to go ‘Is this actress gonna come back or not, because I don’t know what I’m casting for.’ She might come back in a big way in book 6 – I don’t know.

“Jo was able to help and give us hints as to how to prepare for future books without having a clue what was going to happen.”

And given both the success of the adaptation and the fact that JK Rowling is currently hard at work on the fourth novel in the Strike series (apparently titled Lethal White, as revealed by the author when a fan correctly guessed the name on Twitter), we’d say it’s likely we can look forward to sporadic Strike adventures for years to come. Hooray!