How could the death of someone you had never met affect you so?
I picked up The Cuckoo’s Calling for the Popsugar Challenge for a novel written by a female author using a male pseudonym. Robert Galbraith is the pseudonym of J.K. Rowling, so that was an easy pick. I wasn’t that interested to read this book because I didn’t care that much after reading the synopsis. My expectations weren’t very high, but it still wasn’t very great.
Book Review: The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith
Rating:
Title & Author: The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith
Genre: Mystery, Drama
Release date: April 18 2013
Series: Cormoran Strike
Publisher: Little, Brown
Synopsis
A brilliant 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.
I give The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith two out of five hearts because I thought it was an absolute bust. I predicted what happened from the start and I stopped caring pretty fast.
Detective Cormoran Strike started out pretty interesting, but soon his disability started to annoy me and his tendency to keep important information for himself made for an unclear story. There were a lot of other people who were interviewed by him who I didn’t care for at all. Robin wasn’t too bad. She had the right instinct, but she just didn’t click with me.
I thought the mystery around the murder/suicide of a famous model would be more exciting and Cormoran going to different people to interview them wasn’t written in an interesting way at all.
Overall I thought that the Harry Potter books were better mysteries and maybe J.K. Rowling should just stick with children’s literature. I wish it had been a better experience, but it wasn’t and I will not read anymore books she writes under this pseudonym.
Let me know what you thought of this book!
If you have any requests for which book I should talk about next, please let me know in the comments down below.
For now, let books enrich your life!