Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith aka JK Rowling

Goodreads Summary:
A brilliant debut mystery in a classic vein: Detective Cormoran 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 longtime 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, 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.
Introducing Cormoran Strike, this is the acclaimed first crime novel by J.K. Rowling, writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

My Thoughts:

I considered putting this book down more than once and never picking it up again. I continued reading only because I knew that JK Rowling had penned this book and I loved the Harry Potter series. In the end I am glad that I finished the book.

So why did I almost stop reading it? The first half of the book was dreadfully boring and slow. I didn't have a clear picture of the lead character in my mind and I couldn't care less about any of the characters in general. What was clear was that these characters were not at all original. Scene after scene in the book fell flat in setting a stage. I had to make up for the lack of description by filling in much of the stage myself just to have that dashed when the story finally filled those gaps for me. I am not a huge mystery reader, mostly I stick with the Richard Castle variety, so I don't know how an avid mystery reader would like this book but I will say it just felt like one big fat cliche after another.

All of this being sad the second half of the book picked things up for me and by the end I was actually interested in the characters and how the story would end. I was not shocked by the who done it, but I did actually enjoy getting there. I think now that these characters have a lot of potential if Rowling can find her own voice and stop playing into cliched stories.

I would not recommend this to Harry Potter fans. While JK Rowling has a magical way of creating an entire world of fantasy she lacks the ability to set a story it what could be reality. I do see this as a problem she is likely to fix.

I would recommend this to mystery readers, by the end it is a decent read and your lot may be more tolerant of the slow progression in the story. Over all I think this was a decent beginning to a series of mystery novels that I will continue to read.

While writing this review I was listening to Adele.