The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith

The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith
Series: Cormoran Strike #1
Genre: Crime
Release Date: April 18, 2013
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Source: Bought
Add it: Goodreads
Rating:

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, thelegendary 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.

It took me a long, long time to get around to reading The Cuckoo’s Calling because I wasn’t sure I wanted to read anything by JKR that wasn’t set in the HP universe. I’m a bit weird like that. But I finally got to it and I enjoyed it, thank god, otherwise I would have been pretty distraught. (Also why I’m not reading The Casual Vacancy.)

I don’t have too much to say about The Cuckoo’s Calling, other than that it was enjoyable. I really liked the mystery and I mostly liked the way that JKR unveiled it. I had very, very few theories in regards to who the killer was, which is always a sign of a good mystery story for me.

I also liked learning about the backgrounds of various characters, particularly Strike and Robin. However, Robin wasn’t featured nearly enough for my liking. I would have preferred the book if there had been more of a balance between Strike’s POV and Robin’s. Firstly, because she was awesome, and also because having Strike know what was going on but not saying anything was odd since we were in his head. If the points of view had been more balanced, we could have spent more time with Robin without feeling as though Strike was hiding things from the reader just for that big reveal at the end.

That was my main problem with the story, and then there’s the fact that every single one of the female characters seems to be a bit dim. Strike interviews many women and they’re all either unintelligent or they have various issues. I mean, the male characters weren’t exactly flawless, but since we had very limited time was Flawless!Robin, it would have been nice to have some female characters who were just average or “normal” like some of the male characters.

I will definitely be picking up the sequel in the future, although I won’t be rushing out to buy it. Maybe I can buddy read it with someone like I did with this one.