The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike #1), and The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike #2) by Robert Galbraith

I'm way late to the party for reading these books —years too late. I originally didn't intend to ever read them, mainly because I was so disappointed that J. K. Rowling quit writing YA fantasy, and instead started writing adult mysteries. I just wasn't sure how I would feel about them. Well, anyway, a mystery book club I belong to decided to give these a try, and I decided I would try them too. I've posted my ratings and brief comments about the first two books in the series below, along with the book descriptions.

 

  

 My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Mystery
Content: Lots of crude language including the "C" word, Off page sex

 

After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.

This book pulled me in right away. The main character, Cormoran and his assistant, Robin were both likable characters. Especially Robin. I had some issues with the amount of crude language in the book though. I'm never a fan of reading the "C" word, and it was said multiple times along with other words in the book. I don't think that it's considered as bad a word in the UK, but that didn't excuse the use of it to me. The mystery was good, but nothing original, and I figured it out pretty easily. What really kept me reading were the characters, Cormoran and Robin.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Mystery
Content: Strong Language; Off page sex; A gruesome, depraved killing with pretty graphic descriptions of the dead body and its surroundings.

When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, Mrs. Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days—as he has done before—and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home.

But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance than his wife realizes. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel were to be published, it would ruin lives—meaning that there are a lot of people who might want him silenced.

When Quine is found brutally murdered under bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike any Strike has encountered before...

I didn't like this one as much as the first. The only parts I really liked were the parts Robin was in. Cormoran annoyed me multiple times as he pined over memories of his ex, used a woman repeatedly, and refused to do what he needed to do to take proper care of his leg that was amputated at the knee. But the biggest problem I had with this book, was that it was far too long. I kept thinking, surely I was nearing the end, and then I would check and, nope, not even close. There were things about the case that did surprise me, but by the time I got to the end, I didn't care anymore. On the plus side, there was less crude language in this one, but in the end I think I've read enough of this series.