I just finished The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith J.K. Rowling, and I liked it. It had interesting characters, it was simply told, and it kept me interested from page one to page it’s over and you’re bummed, because it’s over. It was, in other words, a page turner, or whatever we’re going to start calling that on Kindle.
It was a bit heavy on the dialogue, but that’s the nature of the genre, you have to have long interviews with people to explain all the clues. It’s also what makes a great writer a great writer. I can’t do dialogue to save my life. After trying to write a couple of lines of dialogue, I play it back to myself in my head and realize “people don’t really talk like that.”
Also, and this is not a specific criticism of it at all, because so many books do this, the characters were both sensationalized and stereotyped. It starts with the suspicious death of a supermodel. so there’s the gay fashion designer who adores her, her b-list celebrity junkie boyfriend, the sleazy casting-couch type film director, his wife the cokehead, the gangster rapper who is obsessed with her, and a few other high flying types.
Then, there is the manipulative, evil uncle, the homeless girl, the West Indian security guard, and the two mysterious black men seen on security cameras running away.
You suspect all of them, in turn, at least for a moment, and the actual killer was one I’d suspected but ruled out because no way, that would be just crazy and, of course, he was.
It’s no Harry Potter, but that’s O.K. If Rowling segues into a run of the mill crime writer , (i.e. she may not be Conan-Doyle, but she can hold her own with Grisham and the like) that’s enough to keep me reading her books. Of which I’m sure there will be more, because she totally left this open for sequels._
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