Review by Rita
April 2013 by Mulholland Books
455 pages
Amazon + Good Reads
"A brilliant debut 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.
Introducing Cormoran Strike, this is the acclaimed first crime novel by J.K. Rowling, writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith."
-Good Reads
As Stephen J. Cannell points out in "A Deadly Game" "there's only three reasons to commit murder - love, money, or to cover up a crime."
Even if the author goes around a bit, it always comes back to one of the tree. I have to say that I saw who did it coming, but I really did not expect the why.
The first thing that comes to mind about this book is that the writing is just so beautiful. It is everything I would expect from Jo Rowling.
I also have to say that I love mystery novels, it is probably my favorite genera, but I don't think this is just a mystery. To be honest, the mystery part is good, it is no Agatha Christie though. I also hate to break it to you, but it is not her first, The Chamber of Secrets is my favorite Potter book, and it is also a mystery.
The characters and their relationships is where it shines. In HP, I always loved the world and the magic, but there is plenty of that in the fantasy world. The characters kept me coming back, they grounded the novels in a way that it feels real.
And she hits the jackpot again on this one, Strike and Robin feel like people you might know, I just want to go to London and work for them. Strike is almost a blending of Sherlock and Watson, brilliant and tortured. Robin is just pure wit, the way I would expect Jo to be in real life.
I love that their relationship is a friendship, yet there is always a door half open for something more.
Also, it would probably make an excellent TV show. BBC? You there?
The special mention goes to the way she built the plot. She manages to leave clues, always pointing the other way. The way she wovens the little bits throughout the novel, creates such an intricate pattern. In a reread, you find everything right there, under your nose, and yet, you can't see.
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