The Cuckoo's Calling
A Cormoran Strike novel, Book 1
Robert Galbraith
Mulholland Books
Fiction, Mystery
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: When supermodel Lula Landry plunged to her death from her London balcony one snowy night, it capped a life of hardship and tragedy. The police quickly ruled it a suicide, the press got their exclusive tell-all stories from family and friends and associates, and her final photo shoot for a popular fashion designer made a lucrative end to her all-too-brief career, then the world moved on... for most people.
Veteran turned private investigator Cormoran Strike can't seem to catch a break these days, culminating in his fiancee throwing him out of their shared home. He can't even afford a proper secretary, forced to use temps like the fresh-faced girl Robin. The arrival of lawyer John Bristow, willing to pay an exorbitant fee to investigate the death of his adopted sister Lula Landry, brings a needed infusion of cash to his failing business, even if it's unlikely to turn up anything the detectives and the reporters haven't already discovered. But the more he digs, the more the pieces don't quite seem to fit. Before long, Cormoran begins to share his client's belief that Lula Landry didn't jump to her death, but was pushed - and that the killer won't stop at just one murder.
REVIEW: The first in the popular Cormoran Strike series reads like a pilot episode, establishing the core cast (rough-edged detective Strike, his secretary-turned-sidekick Robin, the obligatory police detective ally, and so forth) while the story builds almost as an afterthought for a fair stretch of the book. "Galbraith" (famously outed as a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling) creates distinctive characters in a London that incongruously contains both the broken and downtrodden poverty of Landry's birth and Strike's childhood and the paparazzi-plagued elite world of the supermodel's final days, the latter being a fiercer, more predatory jungle than the meanest streets. There are, however, just a few too many characters to keep straight as the investigation wends through various spheres: Landry's world of temperamental celebrity relationships, the moneyed realm of Bristow, and the grungy connections of the supermodel's lost birth mother and her stints in rehab before being discovered (and chewed up) by fame, not to mention Strike's own broad web of connections from his fiancee's world through his military service (where he lost part of a leg) and back to a drifting childhood as the illegitimate son of a groupie and a pop star father. It doesn't help that several of these people, like the (many) details of the case itself, are first encountered via monologues and the reading of reports, not by personal interaction. This was a lot to mentally juggle, especially before it became clear how to organize these details and what to focus on; Galbraith's tendency to shift points of view without warning didn't help, here. Ultimately, slowly, it all comes together, though the earlier sprawl and a lingering sense of meandering (bordering on dithering) kept it down a half-star. I freely admit that written mysteries aren't my usual genre, so perhaps I just don't have the brain muscles to properly assess it; part of me thinks I'd have had an easier time if I'd seen the televised version.
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