Dominic Culpepper is a journalist for News of the World who hires Strike on occasion to do investigative work. He first appears at the beginning of The Silkworm and then reappears in Career of Evil.

The journalist is described as being “almost as tall as Strike but thin, with a choirboy’s complexion. A strange asymmetry, as though somebody had given his face a counterclockwise twist, stopped him being girlishly handsome.”

Strike has a begrudging professional relationship with him — with Strike’s innate dislike of the press, it seems as if it’s all he can do to bring himself to do jobs for Culpepper. As a result, Strike likes to give him a hard time whenever the opportunity arises. As described in The Silkworm, “it was almost pathetically easy to wind up the ex-public schoolboy.”

Strike dates Culpepper’s cousin Nina, who is a useful contact in his investigation, in The Silkworm.