The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith and Devoted in Death by J. D. Robb are pen name mysteries by famous authors I’ve never read. Robert Galbraith is J. K. Rawling of Harry Potter fame and J. D. Robb is the romance writer Nora Roberts. Both books, I think, are excellent. (Tap the book cover images to find the books on Amazon.)
The Cuckoo’s Calling
The Cuckoo’s Calling introduces Cormoran Strike, private investigator. He has had a recent run of bad luck in business and love. Then he gets a new case.
It promises to pay well, but seems to him to be more a matter of reassuring his client than of investigating a murder. It looks like an open and shut case of a London celebrity suicide.
But is it? Or is a murderer hiding in plain sight? With his office temp, Robin, he gets drawn into a sad, tangled story of fame and envy, money and family.
Despite the sadness of Cuckoo’s central story, you still feel cozy in Cormoran’s office looking out on a wet and wintry London. And, despite the nastiness of some of the characters, you feel sympathy toward them.
Devoted in Death
In Devoted in Death, you never feel cozy. Nor do you feel inclined toward understanding the reasons for murder. You see right off the bat who dun it, and why.
You then follow the action and the thinking by police lieutenant Eve Dallas and her detectives as they figure it out. The plot is grisly and twisted enough to make a good episode of Criminal Minds.
It takes place in New York City in 2061. I’m not a big science fiction fan, but this setting is ok. There are some technologies that, to my knowledge, we do not have at the present time. And that is kind of neat to think about. But it doesn’t get in the way of the story.
Some aspects of American society appear to be eternal, one being the disconnect between NYC and the ‘flyover zone’. An Arkansas deputy in the city for the first time expresses his awe: “That kicks the cow in the ass.” That line alone made the book worth reading.
The edition that I have is labelled ‘romantic suspense’. I don’t know why. There is suspense but no more ‘romance’ than in any other genre mystery. The book includes the protagonists’ lives outside the investigation, but not overwhelmingly so. The book is suspenseful, yes, but romantic, no.
Like the authors’ other books?
In their different ways, English versus American most obviously, both books engaged me right from the start. I may now seek out books written under the authors’ real names to see how they compare. For sure I want to read more of their pen name mysteries.
