The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith
My Rank: 3.5 StarsSynopsis:
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.
My Thoughts:
Let me start off by saying that the Robin/Strike relationship is WONDERFUL. When the two of them were together, the book sang. They were by far the two characters that I cared for and worried about.
The Cuckoo’s Calling is not a thriller. It’s a mystery. The only action that happens lasts for one page, so if that’s not your cup of tea, I suggest you pass it on. The cast is a slew of highly unlikeable characters (I can count the number of characters I liked on one hand). All of them are hell-bent on keeping the supposedly suicide case closed. But that doesn’t stop Strike, a giant bear of a man, from asking his questions and getting to the very dangerous heart of the murder.
There were a few nagging bits:
The smoking. This is irrational of me and I know it stems from the fact that I’m a nonsmoker, but when 90% of the characters smoke, it began to grow tiresome. In fact, I couldn’t stop from figuratively rolling my eyes when a new character ‘lit up’. Perhaps most wealthy people smoke? I don’t know. But it would have been nice to have had one or two more of them not wave a cigarette around the place. But that’s just me.
The narrative. I haven’t read much crime fiction or murder mysteries, so I’m really heading out on a limb here: I felt out of the loop. It’s hard for me to explain, exactly. It felt like I wasn’t involved … that I was seeing everything through a window.
Overall, I thought the book was well done. There were stunning moments in it: Guy Some’s interview and Strike’s drunken episode were particularly wonderful. Strike and Robin have the makings of a fabulous team. I hope there are more books written.
Favorite Lines:
The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them.
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In the inverted food chain of fame, it was the big beasts who were stalked and hunted
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Like other inveterate womanizers Strike had encountered, Duffield’s voice and mannerisms were slightly camp. Perhaps such men became feminized by prolonged immersion in women’s company, or perhaps it was a way of disarming their quarry.
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Strike noticed that, in spite of Duffield’s air of disorientation and distress, he had made a good job of applying his eyeliner.
Note: For Adults
