Book Review: The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (Cormoran Strike #1)

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Read it for the sketch that Rowling draws of her private investigator Cormoran Strike. If you don't want that or conversations between characters going around their business in the city of London then better leave it out.

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The Cuckoo's Calling is the first Cormoran Strike novel penned by JK Rowling of the Harry Potter fame under an alias Robert Galbraith. I must admit that I did not read this first, rather I read the last one in the series Lethal White first and found it to be good enough to read the other three in the Cormoran Strike series. But alas! I picked up The Cuckoo's Calling and never went back for the rest.

The Cuckoo's Calling is an ordinary mystery wherein a model Lulu Landry, fondly called Cuckoo by family and friends, falls to her death and her brother John Bistrow refusing to believe the police's verdict that it was a suicide, comes to hire Strike.

Strike is a wounded war veteran who lost one leg in Afghanistan and barely manages to scrape by as a private investigator. He is also emotionally scarred thanks to his parents, has moved out of his long time rich girlfriend's house and now is living in the office. Robin-a temp comes to work for  him for a week but realises that she is good at Strike's kind of work and also enjoys being a part of the investigation where she is not looked down upon as is often done by her fiancee. There is a host of other characters that Robin and Cormoran come across while on the look out for the killer like Cuckoo's chauffeur who is a wannabe star or her friend, her junkie boyfriend and her birth mother as well as her adoptive mother.

The book does not really have a lot of turns and twists and so isn't really a great thriller but it definitely is worth your while if Cormoran's and Robin's story is able to capture you. Their relationship develops over the books and the books also reveal a lot of growth in their characters. Where this book really fails, the author makes up by delivering a story that is humane and very recognisable and that which tugs at your heart strings.

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