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Summary
Summary
Published under a pseudonym, J. K. Rowling's brilliant debut mystery introduces Detective Cormoran Strike as he investigates a supermodel's suicide in "one of the best books of the year" ( USA Today ), the first novel in the brilliant series that inspired the acclaimed HBO Max series C.B. Strike . 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, creditors are calling, and after a breakup with his longtime girlfriend, he's living in his office. Then John Bristow walks through his door with a shocking 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.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In a rare feat, the pseudonymous Galbraith combines a complex and compelling sleuth and an equally well-formed and unlikely assistant with a baffling crime in his stellar debut. When office temp Robin Ellacott reports for work, she's unprepared for the shabby office or the rude greeting she receives from London PI Cormoran Strike. Soon after, John Bristow arrives and asks Strike to look into the putative suicide of his adopted, mixed-race sister, supermodel Lula Landry. Strike reluctantly agrees, even though the police have concluded a high-profile investigation. A decorated Afghan vet with an artificial lower leg, Strike begins a meticulous reinvestigation that leads him into a world of celebrities and wannabes, as well as deep into Landry's sad rollercoaster life. The methodical Strike and the curious Ellacott work their way through a host of vividly drawn suspects and witnesses toward an elegant solution. Readers will hope to see a lot more of this memorable sleuthing team. Agent: Zoe King, the Blair Partnership (U.K.) (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Published in April as the debut novel by Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo's Calling was revealed last weekend to be the ninth full-length work of fiction by JK Rowling after the seven Harry Potter books and last year's adult novel The Casual Vacancy and so immediately changed status from a first edition at risk of remaindering to a No 1 and rapidly reprinting bestseller. As a result, reading the book now is rather like watching a Derren Brown trick on freeze-frame replay, wondering if there are clues to how the wool was being pulled. The easy familiarity that "Galbraith" shows with film sets, for example, is now explained by the fact that eight major movies were made from "his" first seven novels. Rowling also chose to hide herself behind a surname shared with a literary and public figure who had the same initials as her: the economist JK Galbraith. Whether or not that was deliberate, it's also notable that this is, in effect, the second time the author has used a concealing identity intended to disguise gender: her "JK" was famously calculated to hoodwink boy readers thought to be drawn to authors with male first names. To their great credit, some of those who reviewed the book blind spotted that "Robert Galbraith" was unusually attuned to female fashion. To the undeceived reader, there are other hints of fictional cross-dressing. The first character we meet, Robin, sent as a temp to work for London private eye Corcoran Strike, is intensely aware of both the sensitivity of her breasts and the tendency for men to stare at them. While a male writer might also have had these insights, it seems odder that Strike, when he goes into the gents in a pub, is struck by the stink of piss, a fact that soon becomes unremarkable to urinal users. But the strongest retrospective evidence that the book was written not just by a woman masquerading as a man but by Joanne Rowling specifically is its sharp concern with journalism and celebrity. Although belonging to very different genres, the Potter books, The Casual Vacancy and now The Cuckoo's Calling all feature tabloid hacks and paparazzi. The "Galbraith" novel even begins with a pack of snappers outside the house where a supermodel has plunged to her death in an apparent drug-fuelled suicide. Lula Landry another hidden wink, perhaps, as Rowling's Potter books are full of alliterative names is "one of the most photographed women in the world" and may, Diana-like, have been hounded to death by the pressure of celebrity and attention. How fascinating to read these scenes now, knowing that they were written by a witness at the Leveson inquiry. Rowling's animus against the press, which began with the hateful hack Rita Skeeter of the Daily Prophet in the Potter stories, vividly continues, while Landry, who was an adopted mixed-race child, carries on the sympathy for the troubled or excluded that has been one of Rowling's most attractive qualities as a writer. The central character also bears the mark of Rowling's predilection for physical distinctiveness. The Casual Vacancy included a number of massively fat men Hagridian, as Potter readers might have thought of them and private eye Cormoran Strike, a former military policeman, is another very big chap, with the added distinction of a prosthetic leg. The brutal question is what merit the book would have if it were not by JK Rowling. And here, again, compliments are due to the unknowing early critics who commented on the unusual confidence and professionalism of what was presented as a debut. Rowling is a formidable storyteller as shown by the sheer imaginative detail and narrative organisation of the world of Harry Potter and, as Strike and Robin set out to prove that Lula Landry's death was not a suicide, the plot is tightly moulded and told, with the reader's interest ignited by tantalising references to the detective's lost leg or a file of death threats that he has received. And, while never a firecracker stylist, Rowling almost always writes clean, clear prose, although her marked liking for adjectives and adverbs may have been one of the things that gave her away. Few actions or items are left unqualified: the newly engaged Robin wonders, thinking of those less fortunate than herself, "if desperate pity could describe the exquisite pleasure she actually felt at the thought of her own comparative paradise". Typically, each key noun and verb in that sentence has brought a modifying friend along. Rowling's books have always had a high body-count. The Potter novels dispatched major characters at a rate remarkable in children's fiction and The Casual Vacancy, though structurally a social comedy about a parish council, began with a shocking death and included several more. It was partly this deep concern with death that led Ian Rankin to predict that Rowling might make a crime writer, and he is proved correct in a book that extends her reflections on mortality in a literary context where the pileup of bodies is less conspicuous. There will now be considerable pressure for the Strike series to become at least as long as Potter, but even a writer as skilful as Rowling will struggle to overcome the reason that the private detective genre has struggled to flourish in modern English crime fiction, with the majority of series now based around cops. The era of Poirot and Marple is long past; nowadays, once a murder or other very serious crime is suspected, the police take over the investigation and close it down to outsiders. So the gumshoe is left as in The Cuckoo's Calling with the re-investigation of deaths ruled suicides or, otherwise, with non-suspicious missing-person cases. Still more ominously for the prospect of a long Strike series, the adoption of the pseudonym was presumably motivated psychologically an escape from celebrity, expectation and JK-baiters on the books pages and so you wonder, with the mask ripped off, what further use it will have for her. Any subsequent Galbraith books (and another is promised next year) will effectively be published as Rowlings, with all the mania that entails. Her solution might be to assume new noms de plume. For the next few years, the book business could become something like the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition during the years when the press believed that the Prince of Wales was exhibiting under alibis. Just as clumps of reporters would gather around innocuous watercolours that turned out genuinely to be the work of Wiltshire vicars, so there will be sudden runs on debut books that an online buzz attributes to the creator of Harry Potter. For the moment, we are left with an enjoyable, highly professional crime novel that has escaped from the aim its author had for it but taken on a massive new significance for readers. Many pseudonymous novels are intended to make a point: Doris Lessing, in 1984, submitted a manuscript under the name Jane Somers, its rejection by her regular publishers proving to her that the literary business defers to famous names. While Rowling does not seem to have tested her publishers by sending in a book under cover now there would be a tense and interesting experiment her experience with The Cuckoo's Calling does seem to show that unknown first-time novelists are likely to get nice reviews but zero publicity and low sales: the novel was pottering along selling mere hundreds of copies until it started Pottering along. Already one of the most fascinating figures in the history of popular fiction, JK Rowling has become even more intriguing with this brief but neat vanishing trick. Lucky, though, are those few who read it in the purity of obscurity rather than the distracting glare of hindsight. The Deaths by Mark Lawson is published by Picador in September.
Kirkus Review
Murderous muggles are up to no good, and it's up to a seemingly unlikely hero to set things right. The big news surrounding this pleasing procedural is that Galbraith, reputed former military policeman and security expert, is none other than J. K. Rowling, who presumably has no experience on the Afghan front or at Scotland Yard. Why the pseudonymous subterfuge? We may never know. What's clear, and what matters, is that Galbraith/Rowling's yarn is an expertly written exercise in both crime and social criticism of a piece with Rowling's grownup novel The Casual Vacancy (2012), even if her hero, private detective Cormoran Strike, bears a name that wouldn't be out of place in her Harry Potter series. Strike is a hard-drinking, hard-bitten, lonely mess of a man, for reasons that Rowling reveals bit by bit, carefully revealing the secrets he keeps about his parentage, his time in battle and his bad luck. Strike is no Sherlock Holmes, but he's a dogged pursuer of The Truth, in this instance the identity of the person who may or may not have relieved a supermodel of her existence most unpleasantly: "Her head had bled a little into the snow. The face was crushed and swollen, one eye reduced to a pucker, the other showing as a sliver of dull white between distended lids." It's an icky image, but no ickier than Rowling's roundup of sinister, self-serving, sycophantic characters who inhabit the world of high fashion, among the most suspicious of them a fellow who'swell, changed his name to pull something over on his audience ("It's a long fucking way from Hackney, I can tell you..."). Helping Strike along as he turns over stones in the yards of the rich and famous is the eminently helpful Robin Ellacott, newcomer to London and determined to do better than work as a mere temp, which is what lands her at Strike's door. The trope of rumpled detective and resourceful Girl Friday is an old one, of course, but Rowling dusts it off and makes it new even as she turns London into a setting for her tale of mayhem as memorable as what Dashiell Hammett did with San Francisco in The Maltese Falcon. A quick, fun read. Rowling delivers a set of characters every bit as durable as her Potter people, and a story that, though no more complex than an Inspector Lewis episode, works well on every level.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
London PI Cormoran Strike's final feud with his arguably insane fiancee leaves him camping in his office, wondering how his last two clients will keep him afloat and pay for his new secretary, Robin. When a childhood acquaintance asks him to investigate his supermodel sister's apparent suicide, Strike finds a distraction from his problems that's happily attached to a check. Lula Landry was surrounded by rabid paparazzi, a drug-addled social circle, a dysfunctional adopted family, and a shifty, newly found birth mother, making suicidal despair hard to dismiss. But with Robin's surprisingly adept assistance, Strike dismantles witness statements, applying masterful deductive skills to find evidence of murder. This debut is instantly absorbing, featuring a detective facing crumbling circumstances with resolve instead of cliched self-destruction and a lovable sidekick with contagious enthusiasm for detection. Galbraith nimbly sidesteps celebrity superficiality, instead exploring the ugly truths in Lula's six degrees of separation. Strike bears little resemblance to Jackson Brodie, but Kate Atkinson's fans will appreciate his reliance on deduction and observation along with Galbraith's skilled storytelling.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Lula Landry, a celebrity model rumored to have a drug problem, falls to her death one snowy night. Even though the police rule it a suicide, Lula's brother asks struggling London PI Cormoran Strike to investigate. Cormoran knows what he's up against: the rich are famously good at blockading information sharing. Nonetheless, he and his new assistant, Robin, forge an effective partnership as they interview fashion insiders, jealous boyfriends, and dysfunctional family members. The results are devastating. Cormoran's own celebrity roots and status as a wounded veteran (he lost his leg in Afghanistan) color a fascinating tale that explores the lifestyles of the rich and the unhappy. VERDICT Laden with plenty of twists and distractions, this debut ensures that readers will be puzzled and totally engrossed for quite a spell. Galbraith's take on contemporary celebrity obsession makes for a grand beach read. It's like a mash-up of Charles Dickens and Penny Vincenzi. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.