The Cuckoo's Calling

The Cuckoo's Calling is a crime novel by the British writer J. K. Rowling, published in 2013 under the pen name Robert Galbraith. It is the first book in the Cormoran Strike series.

Cormoran Strike is a private investigator who lost a leg while serving in Afghanistan, and the business is going badly: one client, unpaid bills and a bed in his own office. He has also just ended a long relationship, and he is short of somewhere to sleep.

Then John Bristow comes to him with a case. His sister, the supermodel Lula Landry, fell to her death months earlier and the police recorded it as suicide, and Bristow does not accept that. Strike takes the job and begins going back over the last weeks of Lula's life, even though the trail is cold.

It is the first of the books about Strike's working partnership with his temporary assistant, Robin Ellacott, and the series has continued in a number of further novels. It was written under a pseudonym and adapted for television later.