Even though I read every Harry Potter book ten times and loved The Casual Vacancy, I never got around to reading the “Robert Galbraith” mysteries, until now. I think I kind of eye-rolled at the need for secrecy, the use of a second male pen-name, and I just wasn’t interested. Recently, though, I’ve been tearing through mysteries and suspense (as I mentioned here) and decided it was finally time to give The Cuckoo’s Calling a go.
I really, really liked this book but I’m not actually sure why. Bear with me, y’all. For the first two-thirds, nothing actually happens. We are introduced to Cormoran Strike and Robin, we are introduced to the case and many of its players, and that’s kind of it. And yet, I was so incredibly engrossed in this book. I couldn’t put it down, and when I needed to, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It is a much more traditional crime novel, in that the detective spends his time going over the case, instead of having a bunch of action.
In many ways this book is a character study of Strike. He has a backstory that gets peeled back slowly throughout the book, including tumultuous childhood, connections to fame, the military, and disability. He’s also given more flaws than many characters I’ve seen in detective novels, but in a much more human way than someone like Sherlock Holmes. His temp turned assistant Robin is super smart, unraveling pieces of the case and being very sneaky to get him in meetings with witnesses while he just spends time eying her “figure” and worrying whether her fiancee would mind her working with him. He’s basically an archetype of the very nice man who is totally sexist and doesn’t realize it. He isn’t a boor walking around discounting women’s work, he just does it without even noticing or meaning to. I really hope that the relationship with him and Robin is explored more in the second book – she is so smart and I want him to train her to be a full-on badass detective and I want her to stand up and demand that he value her work.
This book is also interesting in the way that it employs an unreliable third person narrator. At first, I though the third-person narrator was more or less omniscient. The only characters whose heads we get into are Robin and Strike, but we DO get into their minds and see what they’re doing and thinking. However, it becomes abundantly clear at the end of the book that there are things that Strike thinks that the narrator does not divulge to the readers. It’s interesting but also gives the ending an air of deux-ex machina.
After being so obsessed with The Cuckoo’s Calling, I am really looking forward to reading The Silkworm and seeing how these characters progress.
ErinKwed 