My rating : 3 stars
Blurb
A brilliant debut mystery in a classic vein: Detective C.M. 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 long-time 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, fell, famously, 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, rockstar boyfriends, desperate designers, and every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man. You may think you know detective novels, but you've never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know the world of the wealthy and famous, but you've never seen it investigated by a detective like this one.
My thought
The book begins with Lula "Cuckoo" Landry's death site.
Newly engaged Robin is sent by a temp agency to Cormoran Strike's office. She is intrigued at the prospect of working for a P.I.
Lula Landry's brother John Bristow comes to Strike's office to hire him to look into Lula's death. He is not convinced it was a suicide. He chose Strike because Strike and John's brother had been friends many years before. At first, Strike turns Bristow down, but Strike is on the edge of insolvency so the lure of a payday convinces him to look into the case.
Strike talks to and tracks down the people who had seen Lula on the last day of her life. In some cases, Robin helps him find the people and in others, Bristow paves the way. At the end of her temp week, Robin makes a private arrangement with Strike to continue coming to the office without telling the temp agency. She does this because she is interested in the P. I. business. She proves to have good instincts and intuitions as well as good acting skills.
Over the course of many interviews and much investigation and piecing together of bits of information, Strike discovers key pieces of evidence which lead him to conclude that John Bristow killed Lula and also killed Charlie many years before.
I enjoyed the relationship between Strike and Robin and was caught up in her wanting to do more as a detective's secretary.the relationship between Cormoran and Robin is especially nice; that of good friends without a romantic overtone; and I really hope it stays this way.
John must have thought that Cormoran can be easily manipulated given his financial situation. He tries to manipulate Cormoran by repeatedly suggesting about the unknown black man running away from the crime scene. He must have planned that with the will not being found, Rochelle dead/not speaking and the black man arrested for murder, he can enjoy Lula's wealth in peace.
The mystery is weak, in my opinion, but still, the way the characters developed made it such a nice read that I am giving it three stars
Nothing too exciting but a not-too-bad detective novel. Enjoyed the characters and how it was brought to a conclusion...can see how there might even be a sequel...As always Rowling had me highly interested throughout the whole novel. Although the one thing that I disliked was the language. i did not like the bad words she used in this book after a AWESOME series of HARRY POTTER :( Over use of the F bomb.
