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.
The Cuckoo's Calling is written by Robert Galbraith, a pseudonym of J.K. Rowling. It is quite the departure from the Harry Potter series! Unfortunately, I found the story only average. It was a fairly typical murder mystery, nothing made it stand out. Actually, some of the clues that were found by the detective were a bit outlandish.
However, the detective himself, Cormoran Strike, is a good, solid character. He has faults, but he works hard to do the right thing. His relationship with his temp secretary Robin is sweet, though there could be problems there in later books.
The biggest problem I had with the book was it was too long. Over 450 pages and the same evidence was gone over and over. Occasionally the reader is given a glimpse of new evidence or old evidence in a different light, but most of it comes out in the exposé Strike gives at the end.
The Cuckoo's Calling is formed in the classic detective style. If you are a fan of Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes, you might want to give this a try. Cormoran Strike doesn't completely stack up against them, but it is interesting.
I give this book 3 Bookworms.
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