Considering how long it took me to finally read the first novel in the Cormoran Strike series, The Cuckoo’s Calling, I am attempting to make up for lost time by pretty much inhaling the next two books. The action starts a few months after the events of The Cuckoo’s Calling, and, due to all the publicity received, Strike is working steadily. Between digging up scandals for a tabloid reporter, tailing suspected cheaters, and basically doing bitch work for rich people, Strike gets a visit from […]
London Calling
I finally (finally) got around to reading the debut mystery novel of “Robert Galbraith”, now famously a pseudonym adopted by goddess divine J.K. Rowling. The Cuckoo’s Calling, the first entry in the Cormoran Strike series, was engrossing and wonderful, and I’m pretty much an idiot for waiting this long. The book starts with a brief prologue, with police making their way through a horde of journalists to the body of an apparent suicide victim; a famous and beautiful woman who has seemingly jumped from […]
Ugly Things in the Darkness, Worse Things in Store
This is the third entry in the Cormoran Strike series, and by far my least favorite. It’s gory and disgusting and way too scary for a fraidy-cat like me. That said, I still enjoyed parts of it and I’ll continue to read any other books that come out in this series, for two reasons: Robin Ellacott and Cormoran Strike. The private detective and his assistant are fantastic characters and I love reading about them and their relationship. I don’t, however, like reading about a serial […]
You’ll Need a Strong Stomach for This One
I enjoyed the first book in the Cormoran Strike series quite a bit, so I picked up the second one, The Silkworm, basically as soon as I finished the first. This one was a little disappointing. In The Silkworm, private detective Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin are investigating the disappearance of an author. It quickly turns grisly as they discover he had an unpublished manuscript (titled Bombyx Mori, Latin for silkworm) that contained grotesque caricatures of several people in his life, and that those caricatures were […]
Just one more thing. . .
This is the first book in the Cormoran Strike mystery series, written by J.K. Rowling under a pen name. It’s a fairly standard plot (crusty, genius detective and spunky assistant investigate a suicide that may actually have been a murder), but I really enjoyed it. I’ve always been a fan of J.K. Rowling’s style of writing–flowy, lots of adjectives and humor, makes you feel like you’re right there in the room. While The Cuckoo’s Calling is nowhere near as inventive or delightful as the Harry […]
J.K. Rowling is a goddess
If you’ve never heard of Robert Galbraith before, it’s for a good reason: Galbraith is a pseudonym assumed by J.K. Rowling. I haven’t researched the reason for the pen name, but given the content of this book (and the first one in the series, the excellent The Cuckoo’s Calling), which is much more mature and graphic, it’s not hard to imagine that she’d like to keep this image separate from her Harry Potter books. So, getting into it: Cormoran Strike is a private investigator in London. […]