Book Comment: The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbrath

Title: The Cuckoo's Calling

Author: Robert Galbraith
No. of pages:455
Published: 30th April, 2013
Read: October 24, 2014
★★★

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. 

Introducing Cormoran Strike, this is the acclaimed first crime novel J.K. Rowling, writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

As I began reading it I already had the idea who the real antagonist is and DISAPPOINTEDLY found out at the end of the book that I WAS RIGHT! It was a good feeling but I was looking for a real twist making me comment that the plot is somehow predictable. It is a book that made me interested on how the author would expound on the plot but it did not really have me hooked. There were parts that were dragging and I feel like there were loopholes. I was hoping for more gravity on the different characters of the book. I was expecting a better ending – one that has more impact. I didn’t even feel the climax of the book but I must say this will again be one of those that would be adapted in movies or TV series.

Bought this upon reading the back of the book review. To be honest, I wasn’t aware that it was J.K Rowling in pseudonym who wrote this. Her writing is still commendable coming from children to young adult genre. This book series, Cormoran Strike, looks promising. BUT Rowling has a really long way to go in this category.

Overall, it was still a good read. It is worth buying because it is still J.K Rowling and who knows when she will also be able to penetrate this genre, with this novel as her starting point.