Cormoran Strike is doing a steady
business as a private investigator since he solved the Lula Landry murder. He and Robin, his receptionist, have just
about all casework they can handle when the distraught wife of a reasonably
successful writer walks through the door.
Her husband is missing, she’s pretty sure she knows where he is, she
just needs Strike to go get him and convince him to come home. Of course nothing is ever that simple. After searching for the missing man for a few
days Strike finds him, somewhere other than where the wife thought he would be,
quite dead, quite gruesomely dead. Now
Strike is trying to stay out of the way of the police while also trying to
solve the murder since his client is sitting in jail and Strike is convinced
she didn’t do it.
I really enjoyed the first book in
the series, The Cuckoo’s Calling, and I thought Galbraith (a.k.a. J.K.
Rowling) would have a hard time topping it but she did. And she did it very well. I could not stop reading this book on the
plane, time I really should have been sleeping, but I was so absorbed in the
story I just kept paging through even though I was completely exhausted. The best part to me was that I had an inkling
who committed the murder, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. When the detective started unfolding his
reasoning I had my aha! moment and felt amateur sleuth-like myself.
If you like old-fashioned hardboiled
detective mysteries you will enjoy Cormoran Strike.
