This week at the Gilpin Library
by Larry Grieco, Librarian
J.K. Rowling writing under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith was perhaps the worst kept secret ever. Still, the result was the debut novel in a new hard-boiled detective series, the emergence of one Cormoran Strike. Strike is a private detective almost by default. He has nothing else to do, and he’s operating minus one leg, lost to a land mine in Afghanistan. He is down to one client, he’s just broken up with his longtime girlfriend, and his creditors are beginning to take notice that the payments have not been forthcoming of late. Not only that, he is living in his office. So it is with a new sense of hope that he accepts the case brought to him by John Bristow. Bristow’s sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, fell to her death a few months earlier, and Bristow is having none of the police theory that it was suicide. He hires Strike to investigate the circumstances surrounding Lula’s death, and the down-and-out detective is off and running. The book is called The Cuckoo’s Calling, and it has received critical acclaim not often afforded to first novels, but it really isn’t Rowling’s first novel, just her first writing as Galbraith. After you sort it all out, you may find that it’s pretty damn good.
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