Review: The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith

The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith
Series: Corman Strike, #1
Published: April 30, 2013
Publisher: Mulholland Books
Pages: 455

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.

Confessions: I picked this up after realizing J.K. Rowling wrote it, and this was my first modern day mystery.

I am a huge fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories, but I haven't actually ever read what people would label as a "mystery" by any author still living. It's not because I try to avoid it or have anything against mysteries (again, adore Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's writings!). I just simply have never been told to read them. I pick up books by reading reviews, following blogs, hype, or occasionally for promotion. Mystery books just have never fallen into those piles. There have been books with elements of mystery, where it is a central part of the plot (the surprise vs. suspense techniques). But this was my first "whodunit" modern novel.

Let me make it clear, I am not knocking off stars because I was upset there were no wizards or dark lords. The world of Harry Potter was beautiful, but it is something in and of itself. What I was looking for were the writing techniques Rowling utilizes so well, and what helped Harry Potter to be such a success. The character building, foreshadowing, story building, plot devices, and clear development of the story. Unfortunately, it fell short on many levels. And it was sad.

I did my research. This book received high reviews from critics. Upon closer look, all these reviews celebrate Robert Galbraith's debut. Expectations are everything, as any economist (or smart human being) could tell you. To read this book with the idea in mind that it is the first book to be published by an amateur author is very different than reading it knowing it was written by the Queen. I admit, if I was reviewing this book as a debut, I would be much more impressed and probably give this book a higher rating. Since it's a series, I would continue to follow it, but expect steadily improving quality as the author becomes more accustomed to writing. But with Rowling, we already saw go through this process with Harry Potter. It might be a little much to expect increasing quality in the coming books. 

I very much wanted to like this book. But I took care to make sure I started the book with a blank slate. I took care of college stuff, caught of on reviews, and generally did everything I had been procrastinating on the entire summer. The first night I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. I am one of the people who enjoyed Rowling's writing style, and loved the eloquence of it. I hadn't realized how much I missed her descriptions until I found myself reading that first paragraph:

The buzz in the street was like the humming of flies. Photographers stood massed behind barriers patrolled by police, their long-snouted cameras poised, their breath rising like steam. Snow fell steadily on to hats and shoulders; gloved fingers wiped lenses clear. From time to time there came outbreaks of desultory clicking, as the watchers filled in the waiting time by snapping the white canvas tent in the middle of the road  the entrance to the tall red-brick apartment block behind it, and the balcony on the top floor from which the body had fallen.

Very few authors have the talent to set up a scene and make it come alive like this with only one short paragraph. This continues for the first few chapters and I thought that this would be a phenomenal book. 

But then something changed. Or rather, didn't change. Because Rowling did such a fantastic job portraying Cormoran in the first few chapters, I lost interest in him for the rest of the book. Because the crime was so well described and set up in the beginning it fell short before the climax. Because all the drama with the relationships between some characters burst quickly, I was rather disinterested in picking up the pieces. Shortly said, I lost interest. I kept reading, and at a very good pace, but I knew as each page turned that my opinion of the books was degrading. I was excited every time we got to meet a new character because Robin and Cormoran quickly grew bland. And I was disappointed each time we did meet a new character because they quickly turned out not to be very exciting. They could have been. But I think the reason I am ultimately disappointed in everything is due to how the mystery turned out.

Like any classic mystery, this one is solved ere the end. And upon it's conclusion...well, I pulled a Morgana.

To me, it was shamefully far-fetched. Not the "whodunit" part, but rather how it came to be solved. The entire time I was reading, I suspected almost everyone. I may not be an expert mystery reader, but I did not expect Rowling to go for the most unlikely suspect because, well, it would be too obvious. And there's also another, slight (not really) detail that was essential to the whole plot originating that was explained but not very plausible. 

There was one other issue I had, that, if fixed, might have recaptured my attention with Cormoran and Robin. They both had partners that were never introduced. Now, it's one thing for these people to have partners that don't have a lot of bearing on their lives (a contradiction if you ask me, but hey, it happens). But both these partners were a source of conflict for these characters, and we were never introduced. Maybe that's intentional and means something special and complex. But I just found it annoying.

The events of this book very much take place on the surface. We're deliberately withheld information for the sake of the mystery. The depths of this book come from the moral and human condition questions. And unfortunately, it was not enough. I found it lacking, though well written. Maybe my expectations were too high. But I think they had a right to be high, and fact is, if this was written by anyone else who I knew to be a good author, I would have the same expectations. So in the end, I'm just left feeling like this -