The Cuckoo's Calling....Harry Potter it is NOT!

The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first non-HP I have read, and I really didn't know what to expect after 10+ years of reading and loving them. Despite my initial questioning, I ended up loving it, and I now definitely believe the JK Rowling is diverse author capable of writing to any audience or genre.

The "just enough info" intro did it's job perfectly in hooking me in and it mostly got better the further I got. The 2 main characters, Strike and Robin, have a great chemistry that's not really a chemistry, if you follow my random drift there, that makes you love them more and more as things progress. I feel like I got to know both of them very well without feeling like it had required reading too many long-winded, not action monologues of personal details to get there. Don't get me wrong, the details were there but interspersed throughout at timely moments to both add to the current storyline and teach you more about the characters, Overall, the superb characters were the resounding highlights.

As an overall fan of mystery/crime, this already had a point it it's favor for the genre. Overall, I did enjoy this one, but the way the storyline progressed is the one negative point I really noticed. When reading a mystery novel, one of my favorite parts is that "Aha!" moment when the trail of clues start coming together (or so you think) and you know whodunit (or so you think again...), and the following build-up of excitement to when you find out that you had it all wrong after all :) Unfortunately though, I didn't get that feeling all with this one. With the number of characters involved and their varying stages of being suspected, I felt like a little too much was put into "trying" to point you in the wrong direction that it ended up being too many different directions. Once I learned whodunit and started hearing the backstory of how it happened, I was easily able to go "Oh yeah!! I do remember that!" or "Oh duh. How did I not get that?" but before that I never felt like I had any solid idea. While the story was still great overall, one of the best parts of a mystery is feeling like you figured it out - while all of the points were there to where I could technically have figured it out, there were just too many diversions in there without enough "outs" for the possible suspects to really do all that much actual figuring.

An excellent read that I would definitely recommend, and I would also love to see these characters continued!

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