Cuckoo's Calling
Score: 5/5 Bookmarks
Cuckoo’s Calling is the first of the Cormoran Strike series of murder mystery / detective novels by Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling’s pseudonym). My sister recently turned me onto the series and as soon as I started this first one I abandoned my pile of ARCs because I was completely hooked.
Cormoran Strike is a rough-around-the-edges private detective who is hired to investigate the supposed suicide of the supermodel sister of one of his old school friends. Strike is ex-military and lost a leg in Afghanistan, he’s a huge, often uncouth bear of a man who sleeps in his office due to a recent break-up and for the first third of the book I didn’t like him much at all. Rowling does an amazing job of helping you get to know him though, through his internal dialogue, and teasing little bits of his past to you, so that by the end of the book you love him like a brother and his most repulsive qualities somehow become endearing.
The first book also introduces Robin, Strikes’s assistant. She falls into his life through a mistake made by the temping agency she’s working for and ends becoming an excellent Watson. I can’t wait to learn more about her in the next book!
I listened to Cuckoo’s Calling on audiobook and it was narrated wonderfully by Robert Glenister who does the best accents (and I basically wish would narrate my life)! You can get 3-for-1 audiobooks on Libro.fm by using the button below. They are the only audiobook service that gives a portion of the price back to a brick-and-mortar bookstore of your choosing!
Synopsis:
The Cuckoo's Calling is a 2013 crime fiction novel by J. K. Rowling, published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
A brilliant 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.
