Publisher: Mulholland Books
Pages: 455, 455, 589
Rating: ★★★
Synopsis
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 by J.K. Rowling, writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
My Thoughts
After being on my "to be read" list for about a year and a half I finally read this series. And it really took me way too long. It took me a long time to read them and a long time to get around to blogging about them. I'm not sure why it took my so long to read them but I think that for me they seemed to drag a bit. Crime and mystery novels are not typically my go-to so when I picked these up I anticipated the non stop thrill of Gone Girl. But this was not that. And to be honest, I could have read the first one and not finished the rest of the series, but I was blinded by my love of J.K. Rowling from thinking anything but the highest for these books and this forced me to push on.
In The Cuckoo's Calling there was definitely more character introduction and a lesson in how the crime/mystery novel would go. The rest of the books follow the same basic structure of getting a case and piecing it together with your mind being blown at the end of the whole process. The first one was probably my favorite for the same reason that the first in any series is anyone's favorite; the introduction to everything. More detail is paid to the descriptions and it is overall a more fun story with the murder(?)/suicide (?) of the supermodel.
The second, The Silkworm, could have been skipped in my opinion. An author has written a scathing exposé about all the people around him and now he is missing. It follows a similar pattern as the first book but it was kind of gross and to be honest I just really didn't like it, so I am just going to move on...
Career of Evil is the latest book in the series and I loved this one! Coming off of The Silkworm, I really wasn't interested in this one but it seemed to be similar to Cuckoo's Calling so I liked it much better! This one involves Robin getting a severed leg in the mail and Cormoran digging through his past to find out who sent it. There is much more backstory on Cormoran and a larger focus on Robin and Cormoran as a pair. This book ended on a cliffhanger and now I am definitely hooked!
I went through a lot of different emotions towards this series and even now, a month later, I am having a hard time deciding whether I really liked it or not. I will absolutely be picking up the next one whenever it comes out, but as for recommending it, I am no sure that I would. If you like crime/mystery novels then definitely go ahead and grab these, but honestly you would be just as good skipping them!
My Favorite Line
He possessed a finely honed sense for the strange and the wicked. He had seen things all through his childhood that other people preferred to imagine happened only in films.