Come To The Cuckoo's Calling

~The Cuckoo's Calling~
Cormoran Strike Mysteries
Book 1
By Robert Galbraith
Pseudonym for J.K. Rowling
Amazon ~ Powell's

A brilliant debut mystery in a classic vein:
Detective Cormoran Strike investigates a supermodel's suicide.

After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.

Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.

You may think you know detectives, but you've never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you've never seen them under an investigation like this.


I'll admit, I'm normally not one for mysteries. Many in my family enjoy reading them and figuring out whodunnit long before the character discovers it, but I'm more along for the ride with the characters than thinking ten moves ahead. Lately I've gotten a little more interested in TV mysteries (House M.D., Castle, Whodunnit?), but have always preferred the more upbeat and campy storylines rather than the dark and gritty ones. Still, with all the hype surrounding this book's release, and being among the first at my library to place a hold, I figured I had to take a peek.

And I got hooked as soon as I finished that Prologue. Very reminiscent of Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, describing the moments following this death of a celebrity, the press and the spectacle surrounding it, and then asking how and why it happened. And that's really what the rest of the book is devoted to; talking with people, gathering information from them, piecing it together, and finally revealing exactly what happened at the end. But whereas Márquez's novella looks at the events from an omnicient eye, this story is seen through the eyes of the private investigator, Cormoran Strike.