Bingo Chart Review: The Cuckoo’s Calling - Robert Galbraith



As part of my bingo chart reading challenge for 2016 I decided to pick up a crime novel. It’s not really my genre, as I for some reason just don’t enjoy crime novels that much. But I decided to step out of my comfort zone and give the genre another go. I picked this particular book because Robert Galbraith is a pen name for J.K. Rowling, and if nothing else, then at least the writing would be good. 

This book is about a private detective who is having a bit of a hard time lately. His business is not going too well, and neither is his private life. An old acquaintance contacts him in order to have his sister’s suicide investigated, as he believes it wasn’t a suicide at all. The detective, Cormoran Strike, accepts the case and works it with the help of his resourceful and intelligent assistant/secretary Robin. 

I liked the story well enough and it was well-written, as I knew it would be. But I found that I wasn’t really all that interested in the mystery of it. The clues were too few and too far apart for me to really feel like something was building, and I spent a good chunk of the book wondering if it was going to turn out to be suicide after all. Only towards the very end did it speed up a bit, and we finally found out what exactly had happened. But the reveal came in a quite anti-climatic way, I think, and it didn’t really feel as satisfying as it should, in my opinion. Possible because I just wasn’t that interested throughout. 

Towards the middle of the book Strike stumbles across a piece of evidence/witness description that seems to give him an “AHA” moment, but he doesn’t share that moment with anyone, and it isn’t explained to the reader until the last reveal. That irritated me, because it gave the sense that Strike had already figured it out, but from what had been revealed until that point, I couldn’t for the life of me see where he was going with it. Towards the end he also gave Robin a small hint telling her to look at some photographs, but that didn’t really help the reader. Maybe it’s just me who sucks at reading mysteries and putting clues together, but I felt like there was no chance to form a plausible theory for the reader, and I think that should be half the fun of reading a crime novel. Again, maybe I’m just not that great at deducing stuff, but I don’t think I will be continuing the series. If I do, it will be because of Strike, whom I found a compelling and interesting character. 


I gave this book 2,5 stars out of 5 on Goodreads. 

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