What is The Cuckoo's Calling about?

The Cuckoo's Calling was published in 2013 under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith and received modest but positive reviews before an anonymous tip revealed the author was J.K. Rowling. The novel introduces Cormoran Strike, a war veteran and private detective with a prosthetic leg and a dissolving personal life, who is hired to investigate the apparent suicide of Lula Landry, a supermodel who fell from her London apartment balcony. Her brother refuses to accept the suicide verdict. Strike, essentially broke and sleeping in his office, takes the case.

The book's intelligence lies in using a celebrity murder mystery to examine class and the particular social ecosystem around fame. Lula Landry moved through a world of very rich people, photographers, hangers-on, and family members whose relationships to her were all, in different ways, transactional. Rowling, writing as Galbraith, is more interested in that ecology than in the mechanics of who-did-it, though the mechanics are solid. Strike's method involves a lot of patient conversation — he is good at being underestimated — and the investigation accumulates detail before resolving in a satisfying final act.

The other major pleasure of the book is Robin Ellacott, the temporary secretary who becomes Strike's partner across the series. She is drawn with considerable care: competent, curious, underestimated by Strike at first, possessed of her own judgment. The Strike-Robin dynamic is the series' actual engine, and this first book establishes it well enough that readers return for it as much as for the mysteries.

The Cuckoo's Calling is a substantial novel — longer than it probably needs to be in its middle section — but it earns the length in atmosphere and character. Readers who want a faster-paced mystery may find the famous-person-circle milieu exhausting; readers who enjoy literary crime with strong characters and genuine social observation will find plenty to like.