A brilliant debut mystery in a classic vein: Detective Cormoran Strike investigates a supermodel's suicide.
After losing his leg to a landmine 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.
Introducing Cormoran Strike, this is the acclaimed first crime novel by J.K. Rowling, writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
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The motivation behind reading this book is, yeah you guessed it. J.K Rowling, I'm a fan of hers and therefore must devour all of her books and when presented with the opportunity to read "The Cuckoo's Calling" one does not simply refuse.
I like a good crime novel just like any other reader and I've read my fair number. There's a bunch of them out there with good plots, some might even argue that those are better than this one. But even though there's a vast number out there we can't possibly read them all.
The Cuckoo's Calling is that old school kind of detective novel. At least that's the kind of feeling it evokes from me. The writing is brilliant. I love it, it's soothing if that makes any sense. It's nice to delve into the story, by the way, it's written.
The start of the story is done very well also. It starts off with Robin, the soon to be secretary of our main character. We start off from her POV then she, as it were, takes us to our main man, Cormoran Strike. The only thing I'm going to say about their first meeting is...well, it was very grabbing.
Cormoran Strike is a great character. He's a former soldier with a prosthetic leg. He's a bit depressing at times, but also very human...(I'm going with that). He's also not created as some extremely sexy male lead as I'm used to in most books these days.
The other favourable mentions when it comes to characters: Robin becomes Strike's secretary. She's a very good one and has some kind of fascination with the job. She and Cormoran become friends in the end (kind of). The person I really want to highlight here is Cormorans ex-girlfriend. I'm not sure why, but she really makes me curious..or maybe I've made her out to be some kind of crazy person.
The story unfolds very slowly in my opinion, but the good writing makes it worth the wait. Everything fits together nicely in the end. It's a great book in itself, but so are many others and I don't know what makes this one exceptional. It would be your choice in the end. I, however, will be reading the sequel if there is one.
Grade:
After losing his leg to a landmine 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.
Introducing Cormoran Strike, this is the acclaimed first crime novel by J.K. Rowling, writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The motivation behind reading this book is, yeah you guessed it. J.K Rowling, I'm a fan of hers and therefore must devour all of her books and when presented with the opportunity to read "The Cuckoo's Calling" one does not simply refuse.
I like a good crime novel just like any other reader and I've read my fair number. There's a bunch of them out there with good plots, some might even argue that those are better than this one. But even though there's a vast number out there we can't possibly read them all.
The Cuckoo's Calling is that old school kind of detective novel. At least that's the kind of feeling it evokes from me. The writing is brilliant. I love it, it's soothing if that makes any sense. It's nice to delve into the story, by the way, it's written.
The start of the story is done very well also. It starts off with Robin, the soon to be secretary of our main character. We start off from her POV then she, as it were, takes us to our main man, Cormoran Strike. The only thing I'm going to say about their first meeting is...well, it was very grabbing.
Cormoran Strike is a great character. He's a former soldier with a prosthetic leg. He's a bit depressing at times, but also very human...(I'm going with that). He's also not created as some extremely sexy male lead as I'm used to in most books these days.
The other favourable mentions when it comes to characters: Robin becomes Strike's secretary. She's a very good one and has some kind of fascination with the job. She and Cormoran become friends in the end (kind of). The person I really want to highlight here is Cormorans ex-girlfriend. I'm not sure why, but she really makes me curious..or maybe I've made her out to be some kind of crazy person.
The story unfolds very slowly in my opinion, but the good writing makes it worth the wait. Everything fits together nicely in the end. It's a great book in itself, but so are many others and I don't know what makes this one exceptional. It would be your choice in the end. I, however, will be reading the sequel if there is one.
Grade:
