I had read that Robert Galbraith is a pen name for J.K. Rowling so that she could try out writing murder mysteries. Since many of the Harry Potter books are mysteries in form, I figured it would be a good example of mystery, in which expectation I was not disappointed. Unlike Harry Potter, however, this is the real world of London, it is not a charming one, and there is no portal to the Otherworld, not at platform 9 3/4 or anywhere else.

The death of half-black supermodel Lula Landry by falling three stories out of her third floor luxury flat at 1 am on a snowy night was very real, but the circumstances of her death were unclear. Tansy Bestigui, who lived with her husband on the first floor, ran out in her negligee shouting that she had heard an argument and saw Lula fall, but further investigation showed that the apartment was practically soundproof with the windows closed, and that Tansy had half a line of coke left in the bathroom, where it would be hard to see Lula fall, let alone identify her. Earlier in the even the paparazzi were lined up waiting for visiting American rapper Deeby Macc, who was arriving from Los Angeles that night, but he did not arrive and they drifted off, leaving the street deserted. A CCTV camera caught two people running shortly after the death: a black man and shortly afterwards someone in a hoodie and gloves.

Cormoran Strike, formerly Special Investigation Department of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, and illegitimate son of rock-n-roll legend John Rokeby by a super-groupie whom he had a fling with, had unsuccessfully gone into private practice. He was in arrears on the office rent, on a business loan, and he had left his narcissistic on-and-off girlfriend and until recently, fiancée, whom he was living with, so he was now sleeping in his office. He was contracting with Temporary Solutions for short-term receptionists, and Robin Ellacott, who had freshly said “yes” to her Matthew, was sent to his office. She was temping while she interviewed for a real position.

Lula’s brother, John Bristow, never believed the result of the police investigation that ruled Lula’s death a suicide, and since Cormoran had been best mates, briefly, with his brother before his brother’s untimely death, Bristow had come to Strike. Strike initially refused the case, but, he did have bills to pay, so he took it on anyway. And it turned out that Robin showed a lot of tact and initiative; indeed, she had secretly harbored a desire to help with a murder case for years.

Strike methodically began to people close to Landry who were open to talking to him, starting with the security agent at the building. He confirmed the above, and told how he had run up to Landry’s apartment immediately upon Tansy causing a scene, searched the place and had found no one there. Lula’s driver was also chatty, and between them, Strike learned that Bristow had visited Lula in the morning, in the afternoon she had gone to meet a friend at a clothing store for fifteen minutes and then met fellow supermodel Ciara Porter, going to the Uzi club, and then returning without her boyfriend Evan Duffield.

As the investigation proceeds, the people in and tangential to Lula’s life are slowly unwrapped. All the Bristow children were adopted, and it seems that the mother, Lady Bristow, had spoiled them, Lula in particular (after the death of her son). John Bristow was a dutiful son, taking care of his mother, who was recovering from invasive surgery for cancer, before her daughter’s death sent her back the wrong direction. The father, Sir Alec Bristow was dead. Lula struggled being black in an upper-class white family, and had been searching out her birth parents. She had located her white mother, who was by all accounts (and Strike’s experience) an unpleasant woman to deal with, and found that the she had a short fling with a black student from Africa. Lula had some mental health struggles, and had gone to a group therapy, where she met Rochelle. Rochelle was homeless, but she was black, which helped form a bond between them since Lula was searching for her black identity. Strike thought that she saw Lula as the possessor of the magic plastic card that got expensive things for her, but Lula found Rochelle trustworthy—apparently once she had told different stories to each of her friends to find out who was leaking things to the press, and the only one who did not sell their story was Rochelle.

Bristow was easily able to get Tansy to talk to Strike, she was incensed that her story was not believed. Tansy’s husband Fred, a rich and famous movie director, who was better known for his ability to make money by casting stars than for his artistic skills. Strike knew straight off that her story was a lie, except that she clearly firmly believed that she had overheard an argument. Tansy’s sister Ursula was there, and both of them turn out to be lovers of money rather than men. Ursula was married to one of the senior partners of the law firm Bristow was working at.

It took some doing on Bristow’s part, but Strike was eventually able to interview Guy Somé (pronounced Ghee Sohmay), the famed black fashion designer who adored Lula, although he, himself, was homosexual. (His name was not originally Guy Somé, as it turned out.) He was heartbroken by Lula’s death, and had not really got over it three months later, she was just the perfect beauty. Strike was able to later interview Lula’s makeup artist, Bryony, who was a little nosy and dyslexic. The latter got her chewed out by Ursula once when Ursula gave her phone to Bryony and asked her to do something on it, but she pressed the wrong button and got a message of someone in a hotel inviting her to bed. The nosiness noticed a blue paper that Lula had written on and gotten two people to sign, and which appeared to be a will leaving everything to her brother John.

Ciara Porter, creamy white with long legs and blond hair, was a non-stop smoker and chatty, and gave an account of the day. Beautiful, a little ditzy (in contrast with Lula), and moderately thrill-seeking. On finding out that he wanted to interview Evan Duffield, she invited him to Uzi where she was meeting him. The paparazzi cameras were literally blinding as they got out of the car (driven by Lula’s former driver). Duffield, a musician and heroin addict, was surrounded by women trying to attract him; Strike noted that he had that wariness of an animal that was hunted, as well as accepting the glory given to the hunter. He was not initially receptive to Strike, who had to use his skill (Ciara thought he needed to be nicer, but Strike ignored that), but he did agree to talk, and they left for his house. Duffield’s relationship with Lula was a bit stormy, but the week before her death they had what Ciara said was a beautiful committment ceremony where he gave her a matching bracelet. But Duffield was jealous of Deeby Macc, who had written Lula into three of his rap songs, and he snubbed her, leading to her returning the bracelet at one point. Duffield was clearly in love with her, although he did not have the emotional health of skills to navigate it well. He got no support from anyone outside of Ciara due to his unkempt hair and drug addiction.

At this point, the police found Rochelle’s body in the river, and Strike said that he suspected that Rochelle would be killed, and had been calling her phone every day to warn her, as he had overheard her calling someone after their interview in a blackmail attempt. The police thought he was crazy and that her death was a suicide.

Strike, himself, we learn, had his leg blown off in Afghanistan, and all this walking around London (having no money to afford a cab) was slowly injuring his stump. He was rather raw, having just left his ex, a gorgeous upper-class woman named Charlotte that he had met at his short time in Oxford, where she had intentionally joined the wrong party to spite her boyfriend, and Strike was simply the first one to talk to her (and he was good with people). She had left him several times, but they both knew that if he left her it was done. Leaving had left him homeless, which he and Robin pretended he was not doing, until Charlotte texted him to say that she had gotten engaged to the ex she had left him for, whereupon he had gotten drunk, and woke up late the next morning, just barely in time for an appointment. Robin was very tactful, took initiative, and was very helpful, even concerned for him. He was glad that she was engaged, because she was attractive, and her being engaged meant that he did not have to think about the attractive part.

Robin was slowly realizing how much she enjoyed the work, although Matthew was jealous and also thought it was a lousy career option. She got a good job in HR at a large company, so she had told him that she would be leaving. She had taken it on herself to drive down to Oxford, where Bristow’s uncle, senior partner of the firm, and a vocal opponent of adopting Lula, had been on a conference the morning of Lula’s death. Except, she discovered, he had never been there. Strike eventually deduced that he was sleeping with Ursula, the other senior partner’s wife.

At Rochelle’s funeral, Strike had Robin mention to Bristow that Strike was getting death threats every week from a client who did not like the results that Strike discovered and blamed Strike for everything. He arranged to interview Lady Bristow on Monday. Bristow had an urgent work assignment and could not come, forbidding Strike to interview her without him, but he went ahead, anyway. Lady Bristow was not well and was pretty drugged, but was able to answer his questions, and John Bristow’s uncle had not been to see her on the day he of Lula’s death, despite his and John’s claims. When Lady Bristow fell asleep, he hunted around in the wardrobe until he found the handbags that Somé had given Lula. Bryony had mentioned that some of them had detachable linings one could use as a scarf, and since no one had been able to locate the blue paper, he reasoned that it must be there, and indeed he found it in one of the linings.

Strike went to the police urging them to put out a warrant for the arrest of the killer, although they were reluctant. Then he went to his office, insisted Robin go home, and waited for one of three people to arrive. Eventually John Bristow came, complaining that he had been called on a wild goose chase to Rye, and that Strike had talked to his mother in his absence. His phone set to record, Strike told John how John had killed first his brother, who got all the attention, and then Lula. He had been embezzling money from the law firm, and the uncle had presumably discovered it, he was pressed for money, and the trust fund had been invested in a stock that had done very terribly. On the morning of Lula’s death, he had tried to persuade her to give him money and she had refused. He hid out in the unused second floor apartment, and after Lula returned and the paparazzi left, he went up to her apartment with some roses that Fred Bestigui had put in the apartment in hopes of luring Deeby Macc into a part in a movie. Lula saw only the roses, opened the door, they argued, and he threw her off the balcony, as her money would go to Lady Bristow, and upon her impending death, fall to him. Tansy had been discovered doing cocaine by her husband, who had a reputation as an abuser, and he had sent her outside in her negligee in the sub-zero temperature as punishment. Strike had discovered pictures that had shown a person standing on the balcony, visible between the slats of the floor. She stuck to her lie because her husband could not afford more abuse scandal and was paying to her to lie even when it was obvious that she was not telling the truth. But since she was outside, she did actually hear an argument. The will left Lula’s fortune to her recently discovered brother, Jonah Agyeman, who was on leave from Afghanistan the day of her death, and Bristow did not want Strike to find it, so he forbide him interviewing his mother, but Strike had had Robin make the call pretending to be an assistant telling him of the urgent case. Bristow attacked Strike with a knife; he defended himself with his prosthesis.

In the end, Strike’s business boomed, the police were embarrassed, and Robin decided to take a pay cut to continue working as his assistant.

Cuckoo’s Calling is an adroitly done murder mystery, as I expected. Even more so than with Harry Potter, Rowling makes observations about people’s personalities in a concise, poetic way, that leave you with a vivid view of what this person is like, even though your interaction with them is brief. The depth is in the characters and their interactions, which are slowly untwined to reveal what actually happened the night Lula Landry died. This is no technical puzzle-solving like Sherlock Holmes, or curious intellectual problems like Poirot solves, nor is it the unusual methodology of death such as would displace the ennui of Lord Peter Whimsey. It is a rather plain murder elegantly wrapped in layers of different characters.

I have taken the approach to mysteries that it means what the word is: “something hidden”, not “something you should be able to figure out”. I think Rowling does give sufficient evidence to identify the killer—since it crossed my mind, even though I rejected it due to lack of motive. It is unclear to me if the motive was sufficiently apparent. It does seem disingenous to have Strike voice (mild) regrets over disobeying Bristow’s order to not interview his mother alone, when Strike was the one who set up that situation in the first place. Not only that, but it seems an unlikely behavior—why say anything when it is distinctly noted that there is no one on the street to overhear it—which intentionally misdirects the reader. Otherwise, no complaints, it was a good ride.

The characterization was rich, but I found the topic to be uninteresting, although it is a testament to Rowling’s writing that she can make it interesting anyway. Every one of the characters is deeply emotionally unhealthy, although in a different way, and only Lula, Strike, and Robin make decisions that could be considered reasonably healthy. Why would I want to read about a dysfunctional world where everyone is taking drugs to numb the misery? Maybe the point of the book is to shine a light on the dark side of fame, but to the extent that is so, I feel used: I signed up for a murder mystery, not to vicariously experience darkness.

If the British paparazzi are anything like they are described here, though, I can see why would have driven Diana to her death. If you get blinded by camera flashes every time you get out of the car, and you car is always followed, and everything you say is leaked to the press, with no hope of it ever stopping, well that would drive anyone to unsafe things.

This is a well-written murder-story, with vivid characters and great pacing, with a few adroit curveballs. Very well told. The subject matter of people with more money than their ability to handle the stresses of life, however, is not something I have any interest in. I recommend this for the story-telling craft, but it does not leave me wanting to read any more of the series.