Book: The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith

But really written by J. K. Rowling, which I did not know when I picked it up at the library, and just happened to find out via a small note on the inside back cover.

It's murder mystery with an penurious private investigator, who has just broken up with his rich, edgy, gorgeous girlfriend and who is still recovering from a war wound which resulted in a partial amputation of one of his legs. He sleeps in his office and takes showers at a local college. He has almost no business until this case comes along. He hires an efficient young woman from Temp Solutions on a weekly basis, and she helps in small ways, thrilled to be on the periphery of solving a crime.

The victim was a celebrity…a famous model, who falls to her death from her apartment window.

Accident or murder?

I liked the characterization and the plot up to a point. Then, at the end, it devolved. As I see it, to write a good compelling murder mystery, one has to be smarter than nearly everyone else in the story in order to figure out the twists and make them believable. Sometimes an author pulls it off and sometimes not, as I felt was the case here. For me, the denouement was not as good as the rest of the book, which I kind of liked. Rowling certainly writes as well as hundreds of other contemporary published authors, and no one would question her imagination, but there were too many serendipitous finds and brilliant deductions in the convoluted web of characters. It wasn't exactly lean and elegant.

I much preferred A Casual Vacancy