REVIEW: THE CUCKOO'S CALLING BY ROBERT GALBRAITH

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, thelegendary 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. (Summary via Goodreads)

Note: This review will be spoiler free.

Phew! So this was pretty intense. 

I haven't read a crime novel in quite a long time and I thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to get back in to them. Plus, I will automatically read anything that JK Rowling puts out there. I wouldn't care if she published a novel about the life of an inanimate object, I would still buy it and read it. I got this for my birthday (11th) and started it straight away and I've only just finished it. I thought it was quite slow at first but this may be because lately all that I've been reading are dystopians or fantasies and I'd gotten used to there being a twist around every corner. 

If you're looking for a fast-paced crime thriller, this is not the one for you. The pacing is slow, and we follow private detective Strike in his pursuit to prove that a suicide was in-fact murder. This does include following him throughout his whole day, even sometimes the mundane parts. Although it's not fast-paced, this novel makes up for it in the depth of the characters. They were all so believable and so interesting. They felt so much like real people that you would meet around London and I loved them.  Our two main characters, Strike and Robin were well so well written that I became invested in them almost immediately. 

For me this book was a huge change of pace, but a refreshing one. I liked the mystery of it all and spent almost as much time coming up with theories as I did reading it (and I was still wrong, damn it). When I was about half way through I was just equally suspicious of every character.  The big reveal at the end is not one of the best I've ever read, but at least I didn't see it coming. It shocked me, and I love how the story all comes together in the end and it all makes perfect sense.  

I did feel at times that the book was longer than it should be, the story could of been told in a lot less pages, but I didn't mind all that much because all I too fixated on finding out who the murderer was!

I can't wait for the next book in the series, I don't even mind what the plot-line is. I'm just excited to read about these characters again!